A scintillating story ran in the New York Post today about a jobless college graduate who is suing her alma mater for not doing enough to help her find a job.
New Yorker Trina Thompson, 27, is suing Monroe College for the $70,000 in tuition she spent earning a bachelor’s degree in information technology, according to the article. Thompson says the Bronx-based school’s Office of Career Advancement hasn’t provided her with career advice and leads it promises.
A Monroe College spokesman said the lawsuit is completely without merit. That’s likely if the college never explicitly promised services it didn’t provide or, foolishly, a job proper.
Better yet, it doesn’t quite correlate for Thompson to sue for her tuition, which pays for the classes she attended and not necessarily the school’s career office. After all, it wasn’t a job-hunting consulting firm — a college’s primarily objective is to educate, and a career office can be construed as a perk.
Still, that raises a question: just how responsible should a college or university be for helping its students get a job?
Above all, the higher-education industry peddles information and knowledge. The unsaid promise is that such information, knowledge and experience will contribute to facilitating obtaining a relevant job. Most schools are smart enough to ward off promises at the outset: we’re here to help you, but we can’t promise that you’ll get a job.
Yet with a global economic downturn still reverberating through the job market — there are as many as 6.5 million jobless Americans seeking unemployment compensation, according to a New York Times report, and the unemployment rate in the U.S. is expected to surpass 10 percent — there are an awful lot of angry college grads out there wondering what happened in the job market while they were busy studying as students in the library.
And as budget cuts sweep across the nation’s colleges and universities, from elite private schools to large public universities, career offices — which also function as a resource that helps keep alumni wallets generous — are more squeezed than ever, just as alumni need them the most.
Just how responsible should colleges and universities be in helping students get jobs? Is an education enough, or should career advice be less a perk and more a (legal) requirement?
