“What the institution needs to understand is that unless [the school] has been thoughtful, and has invested resources, time, and strategy into helping students transition from their first profession to their next, [the students] are going to have a really rough time,” Sciola says. “It’s no longer good enough to have a career center that’s reactive or transactional. 2008 and 2009 fundamentally changed the experiences of seniors graduating into the workplace. And it’s not going back.”

Mary Alice McCarthy, a senior policy analyst for the New America Foundation’s Higher Education Initiative, agrees. She says seeing tangible return on investment in career development has become an issue of the utmost importance because of the rising costs of higher education. The recession only increased the urgency to examine it further. “The kind of data we need is longitudinal data…what we need is better outcomes data from higher education institutions so that we know over time what models are the most successful for people, so parents and students can make a determination about what works well for them. The more options the better,” said McCarthy.

The career development model that Colgate University and Sciola are betting on is a recently revamped series called “Real World.” The 18-year-old program was once a three-day career immersion event each January, but last year it was expanded into a full-year suite of programs. Sciola says that starting the job hunt during the second semester of senior year is too late, especially when employers use the summer before to recruit. “We start in September with a big networking event on-campus where we teach networking skills, have 100 alumni back on campus and set up alumni panels. We also throughout the fall and spring semesters run a series of workshops and events that are all designed to help students transition into life after Colgate.” That means students learn about everything from knowing their worth in a salary negotiation, to finding an apartment, dressing for success and buying a car. Over winter break, the school also holds networking events in the five major cities where Colgate students wind up, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco. “We’re arming them with the information that they need to be good self-advocates…The ‘Real World’ branding is a full-year strategy to get our students prepared and launched,” said Sciola.

Sciola was the force behind a similar program at Wesleyan during his 17-year tenure as the school’s career center director. Sciola says after the financial meltdown in 2008, seniors were paralyzed by the news they were seeing about their potential lack of job prospects. Sciola’s solution to “get students unstuck” was to put together a series of workshops that February called Senior Survival Month. Sciola called on the Wesleyan graduates of the early 1990s who had experience entering the workforce in a poor economy and integrated their advice into the event’s signature program, “Optimizing Career Resilience and Planning,” or OCRAP. Yes, the acronym was intentional. The workshops touched on big issues like navigating office politics, how to address sexual harassment, and other topics that don’t always come up in a resume review session, like whether it’s okay to share proprietary information with your parents. According to Sharon Belden Castonguay, who was made Wesleyan’s career center director in May, Senior Survival Month is no longer being offered. However, the school’s job shadowing program has been re-launched, and students have the option of participating in one of two intensive week-long programs in January that focus on what goes into choosing the right major and career path, and a boot-camp introduction to the job hunt.