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I am not sure if it was a slow week in terms of good things to read or whether I was just suffering from Post-Norway Depression. I am certainly missing some of the food I ate there. In this case, it was a ceviche-style fish dish I had in Trondheim.
But what did I read, apart from menus and descriptions of smoked fish?
As I pulled together the pieces I wanted to tell you about, it struck me that they were mostly about mobility and structure and the interplay between the two. Workers trying to advance in their careers. Institutions trying to respond to changing enrollment markets. Students using online learning to attend institutions more flexibly. Yet each report also served as a reminder that mobility never happens in a vacuum. The structures, assumptions, and pathways we build continue to shape behavior long after the environment around them changes.
The burning career platform
A new report from the Burning Glass Institute on mid-career mobility subtly shifted how I think about career outcomes in higher education. Drawing on more than 1.3 million career histories of college-educated workers, the report examines a problem that higher education rarely discusses: career stall.
Drawing on over 1.3 million career histories, we find that 24.2% of mid-career professionals are stalled, defined as a period of five or more years with no meaningful promotion and negligible wage growth.
[snip]
Our analysis reveals that mid-career stall often starts developing earlier in a worker’s career. By examining workers at their ten-year career mark, we find a stark divergence between those who will later stall and those who will not. Those who ultimately stall out have already fallen behind—averaging just 1.5 internal
promotions and 30% wage growth in their first decade, compared to 1.9 promotions and 71% growth for peers who have kept on pace.
What makes this report particularly interesting is that it challenges the way higher education thinks about outcomes. We have largely evolved from ignoring what happens after graduation to focusing heavily on employment outcomes. But those measures are still overwhelmingly focused on first destination. Did graduates get jobs? How much did they earn? Where did they work?
This report suggests those may be incomplete measures of success. Employment is not the same thing as mobility.
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