Look around at your friends with college graduates. What are their college graduates doing? Many are living at home!

Studies reveal that a growing phenomena is a young person who goes away to college, has a great experience, graduates, then moves back home for a year or two to figure out what to do with his or her life. Graduates and parents are wondering whether it makes sense to spend four or more years at college and finish with no clear sense of who they are or what they want to do next.

The trend points to one of the great shortcomings of many of our nation’s leading colleges and universities. Structured, mentored opportunities to think about life after graduation are rare. The formal curriculum focusses on the academics disciplines of the arts and sciences. Advising on how various majors connect to pathways into the workplace is typically haphazard. Career planning offices are often understaffed and marginal to college life.

Programs that give undergraduates in the liberal arts the opportunity to step outside an academic framework and see how the subjects they are studying connect to life beyond college are critical. Employers and graduate programs prefer students with experience in the fields in which they intend to work or pursue advanced degrees.

Most colleges today advertise some sort of internship program. Only a limited number, however, have created a structured, well-supported program that helps students find and prepare for the right placement, link that experience back to classroom work, and provide for reflection in a mentored setting.

College will be one of life’s richest experiences. But remember that college is both an experience in itself and a building block of a total life structure. Choose a college that takes this latter role seriously.

[Excerpts from The Christian Science Monitor, January 10, 2008/ Freeland.]