The Career Map Has Changed
The path to a career, for a long time, was the employers to decide. Employers supplied the ladder. Universities supplied the credential. A student’s task was predictable: earn the grades, and things worked out. The GPA worked as the sorting mechanism because employers were, in effect, hiring standardized ability, and a number captured it well enough. If a graduate did not work out, it did not matter. A thousand more applications were waiting.
But the subtle shifts are now impossible to ignore, and the industry is starting to say so out loud. Earlier this month, Matthew Pittinsky, the co-founder of Blackboard, returning to lead the company he helped build, published Mark Hopkins’ Log, a new essay extending his LMS at 30 series, arguing that the learning management system never earned its L. His diagnosis is exactly right. The LMS is organized around the course, not the learner. Learning happens in the links out of it. All that survives the semester is an enrollment and a letter grade. He even notes that the category has renamed itself before: Gartner observed in 2002 that these were course information systems, and by the mid 2000s the industry rebranded Course Management as Learning Management while the paradigm stayed exactly where it was. The name changed. The measurement did not.
Are We Still Measuring the Right Thing?
I read his essay with deep recognition, and with one fundamental disagreement about what comes next. He wants to finally measure what students learned, carrying evidence from assignment to program outcome to credential. It is the right architecture, and he is right that generative AI, supervised by faculty and structured around their rubrics, makes that kind of assessment possible at scale for the first time in the history of the category. But the harder question sits underneath his: is what we have been grading still what the labor market is asking about? I don’t think so. The opportunity in front of higher education is not to measure the old thing better. It is to measure a new thing entirely.
What Employers Are Actually Looking For
Consider what employers are actually saying. In a Hult International Business School survey reported by Forbes, 75 percent of employers said colleges are not properly preparing students for the workforce. And when hiring managers explain why recent graduate hires fail, they almost never cite technical gaps. In a ResumeTemplates.com survey of 1,000 hiring managers, the top reason recent graduates did not work out was a lack of motivation or initiative, followed by professionalism, time management, and difficulty handling feedback. Those are human capacities: judgment, agency, self awareness, the ability to know what matters, build it, and articulate its value.
Meanwhile, the students hold up their end of a bargain that no longer exists. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, unemployment among recent college graduates stands near 5.6 percent against roughly 4.2 percent for the workforce overall, the widest gap on record, and recent graduates have run above the overall workforce since 2021, reversing an employment advantage the degree had conferred for decades. The map that worked for a hundred years has stopped working, and it stopped working first for the people holding it.
We grade everything except the one transition that decides everything. We measure career outcomes after students leave, when it is too late to help the person being measured. And we quietly assume students will absorb professional readiness on their own, which is another way of saying we assume they have families and networks that teach it at home. Or, proximity to their peers at work is enough.
First generation graduates earn up to 14 percent less than peers with identical degrees, even controlling for field of study. The diploma does not close that gap, because the gap was never about the diploma. It is about everything around the diploma that nobody teaches: how to turn who you are into a story, a plan, a first role. I know this gap personally. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, and I built my career without a map. For years I thought that made me the exception. I now believe I was the preview, because the self built path is no longer the alternative route. It is the route.
What Should Replace the Old Arrangement?
So what should replace the old arrangement? We could start here:
- Career readiness must become a curriculum. It cannot remain a workshop during finals week or an optional visit to an office students never find. It must be graded, scaffolded, experiential coursework, because the capacities that now sort the labor market are built through practice and feedback, not exposure. When one of our university partners made career readiness worth 15 percent of a course grade, students treated it as real work, because for the first time an institution said it was.
- Readiness must be measured while it can still change. That means tracking real behavior, practice, reflection, and demonstrated growth continuously, and scoring each student against their own starting point rather than a curve. A survey at graduation tells you what happened. Behavioral measurement during the degree tells you what to do next, for this student, this term, while support still matters. This is where I would extend my industry colleague’s argument: he is building the circulatory system to carry evidence of learning. I want that system to carry evidence of velocity, how fast a student is moving from where they started toward where the labor market needs them to be. A grade is a position. Velocity is a direction and a speed, and it is the only measurement that tells you something before it is too late to act on it.
- And it must be built for the students actually enrolled. The default student for whom career services and legacy ed tech were designed, continuing generation, residential, and networked into professional life through family, is no longer the default. At many public universities, first generation and working students are the majority. At Fresno State, 68 percent of undergraduates are the first in their families to earn a four year degree. Continuing generation students often arrive with options for preserving and growing generational wealth. For many first generation students, college is still the entire promise of a better future. For them, explicit instruction is not remediation. It is equalization. This is also established design practice, not charity. Stanford’s d.school teaches designers to study their most constrained users, because those users’ amplified needs reveal what everyone actually requires, and their workarounds point to the best solutions. Design for the student navigating college without a map, and you are forced to make every expectation explicit, every step structured, and every assumption visible. The result is a product that works better for all students, including the ones who never needed the map in the first place.
From Passengers to Pilots™
Cura’s curriculum is built on four bodies of research: Mark Savickas and Career Construction Theory, which treats a career as a story the student authors rather than a path the student finds; Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, which explains why autonomy, competence, and connection drive motivation; Tara Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth, which recognizes the assets first generation students already carry rather than cataloguing what they lack; and David Blustein’s Psychology of Working Theory, which insists that work is central to dignity and mental health, not just income. One more distinction runs through the entire design: approach versus avoidance motivation, whether a student is moving toward growth or away from failure. Psychologists describe these as the two most fundamental motivational states, a framework developed by Andrew Elliot and colleagues, and it is the research behind Passengers to Pilots™, our name for the shift from a student who is carried through their career preparation to one who is flying it.
Taking Career Readiness Into the Classroom
Next week, students at CSU Fresno walk into ACCT 189T, a 1 credit career readiness course built on Dr. Susan Henderson and Dr. Fernando Parra’s syllabus and his deep commitment to the value of self efficacy.
Cura, a social enterprise led by two first generation Latina founders, designed this curriculum with these students in mind, drawing on the research above and our own experience of navigating work without a map. Why does this work? Career theory meets industry experience, university credibility and real classrooms, local employers and alumni who teach and mentor, and scaffolded learning through the Cura app that analyzes real outcomes in real time. This class is the exact antidote to the paradigm shift. Everything is structured under the Cura premise of moving students from Passengers to Pilots™ of their careers, and we measure student growth in agency, judgment, critical thinking, AI literacy, self reflection and self awareness, and most importantly, self efficacy: can I really do this?
Today you will also notice a new look for Cura. We are growing up too. What does not change is our deep principle of cura personalis, care for the whole person, which we translate as care for the whole student. I agree with Pittinsky that the days of centering the course have expired. Centering the whole student is what matters next, for them and for all of us.
What Comes After the GPA?
The GPA had a steady hundred year run. It sorted a world that no longer exists, and it never sorted it fairly. What comes next will be built in classrooms, measured honestly, and designed for every student, starting with the ones who were never handed a map. Stay with us and we will show you how we measure for the student of the future.
As for Cura, we head back to school this fall with a few more university partners. One school, one implementation, at a time.
Jen Elena Romano is the CEO and co-founder of Cura, a social enterprise partnering with universities to prepare, improve, and measure student outcomes for the future of work. cura.us
