College-bound students often make decisions about a major without a clear understanding of how those majors align with career options, which can cause them to accumulate excess credits, extend amount of time to degree attainment or even drop out completely.
That’s the findings from a new report by Complete College America (CCA), which outlines the components of its strategy Purpose First that helps students look at their options, make informed decisions on a major and achieve goals toward on-time graduation. The report also provides results from a three-year demonstration project done in support with Strada Education Network.
Purpose First has always been a part of CCA’s prescriptive set of guidelines for the guided pathways movement, said Dr. Dhanfu E. Elston, vice president of strategy at CCA. The strategy aims to provide a “missing link” between career choice, guided pathways and first-year momentum.
“One of the things that we were quickly able to learn and share in the larger higher education community was very few institutions were doing that well in helping students identify a strong connection between their majors as well as their career outcomes,” said Elston. “The Purpose First strategy is really a development of that informed choice of major component of our momentum pathways structure.”
Underrepresented minorities and less advantaged students are primarily affected by uninformed career choices as a result of them not having the social capital and the lack of institutions developing systems to help them develop that capital, Elston noted.
However, these students are eager to receive the assistance, the report said.
Students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were more than 50 percent likely to utilize resources from career services to learn about careers than their peers at predominately White institutions.
