Universities still treat careers like the small print

In Plain Sight - 01

In Plain Sight is a new weekly blog from Rhys that we will publish every Thursday at 8am UK / 9am CET. Each edition will be focused on a thorny topic within investing, startups, learning and work and policy.

In Plain Sight is partially a personal attempt to think independently and to avoid leaning too much on AI for answers to our questions. Will we use AI to edit and polish the text? Yes. But more importantly, will we come up with all of the ideas and analysis? Yes.

Here follows Edition 01 - 'Universities still treat careers like the small print'.

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Here's an audio version if that's your preference: 

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The course I studied at university was called Land Economy (fun fact, Izzy in our team also studied Land Economy). Nobody knew what the course entailed - this is reasonable enough because it's the only course with its name in UK higher education.

For three years, I developed a standard response to the question: “So, is that… farming?” I would explain that it combined economics, law, finance, property, environmental policy and development. The explanation took several minutes and usually ended with the other person looking no less confused.

Cambridge has now renamed the course Environment, Law and Economics - which is a bit clearer and reflects the way a student describes it to a colleague - but, granted, still sounds a bit incongruous.

The more revealing part of the course page - and the focus of this blog - comes near the bottom, under “Careers”.

Graduates, it tells us, become lawyers, economists, civil servants, consultants, business people, educators and researchers. Some work for national and international agencies. Others enter finance, business or public service. This is not wrong. It is simply spectacularly lifeless and sounds outdated.

It also raises questions. How many graduates genuinely become economists? What does “business” mean? Why are founders, technology leaders, investors(!) and NGO leaders absent - or buried inside categories so broad that they become meaningless? More importantly, why is the question of what students might actually do with their degree relegated to the bottom of the page?

Any good designer will tell you that placement communicates priority. Universities place admissions requirements, course structures and academic content near the top because those are considered the serious parts. Careers appear afterwards, like terms and conditions: necessary, slightly vulgar and best handled quickly. This is intriguing - is it because the quality of underlying networks for a typical student at these universities is deeper and therefore their need for careers advice is lower than a 'typical' student? Perhaps this is true. Universities are widely touted with being social mobility enablers - you work your way into a top institutions and find yourself rubbing shoulders with people that had been 'better coached', let's say. In my view, the mobility part doesn't really happen whilst you're at the university - it happens after, when you're entering your career and framing your career ambitions...
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Cambridge is unusually stark in its limited careers guidance, but it is not unusual. I reviewed course pages at a number of other universities - across course pages at Oxford, UCL, LSE, Imperial, Warwick, Bath and Exeter, careers are usually presented as validation at the end of the purchasing journey rather than as a central reason to choose the course.

The strongest pages tend to belong to institutions such as LSE, Warwick and Bath, where graduate destinations, placements, named employers and career support are given more prominence. Imperial often makes career relevance implicit through the direct applicability of science, engineering and computing. UCL is more commercially aware than many peers. But even at these institutions, the course description usually begins with intellectual content and only later explains what that knowledge might allow someone to do. In all fairness, this feels right as the intellectual content is the ‘product’, career preparedness is one of the outcomes.

(As an aside, we suspect that universities lower down the rankings place a higher priority on destinations. Universities towards the top of the rankings still rely on their legacy brand and lore to attract applicants).

The dominant unit of career information is remarkably crude. As briefly mentioned, graduates are reduced to occupational nouns: consultant, analyst, lawyer, economist, researcher, civil servant.

A person joins McKinsey at 22 and is recorded forever as a consultant, even if they later launch a climate company, runs a foundation or becomes an investor. Someone begins as an analyst and later becomes a founder, chief executive or public leader. The university captures the first rung of the ladder and mistakes it for the destination.

That partly reflects how graduate outcomes are measured. Universities tend to know what graduates are doing shortly after they leave. They are much less likely to understand the sequence of roles, experiments, failures, relationships and decisions that constitute an actual career. This is why solutions like Drimmly (a Brighteye Founder Studio company), designed to help students map their dream careers and then find a path forward, hold such promise.

Most universities' current approaches create an impoverished picture of what their education enables. It is particularly weak for broad or interdisciplinary courses. Computer science and engineering can point towards recognisable employers and professional pathways. History, Geography, Philosophy, languages or Classics have a harder - but arguably more important - storytelling job.

They frequently retreat into language about “transferable skills” and “a wide range of careers”, which is often institutional code for: this is probably useful, but we have not seriously mapped how.

Land Economy was unusually good preparation for a modern career precisely because it was broad. It taught students to move between law, markets, institutions, property, public policy and the environment. Its graduates were not destined for one profession; they were equipped to understand systems and to be entrepreneurial and creative in the direction they take.

Indeed, I count ~8 startup founders within our cohort, which amounts to more than 14% of students, that have founded companies within fields like education, logistics, procurement, and real estate. I also count at least 4 people in VC, equivalent to ~7% of the cohort. So, >1/5 grads become founders and/or VCs - this doesn’t even include people that go on to be leaders in start-ups/ tech companies. This isn’t to say that these are cooler/ better professions than those listed in the careers language - it’s more to observe that both i) the careers language is lifeless and one-dimensional and ii) it’s out of date…

This speaks to a deeper institutional problem. Universities still tend to treat preparation for work as something that surrounds the degree rather than something that should help shape it.

Careers fairs, for example, help students present themselves to employers after the educational product has already been designed and delivered. They do not answer the more fundamental questions.

Why does this particular curriculum prepare someone for certain opportunities? Which practitioners will students learn from? What professional work will they complete? Which alumni will they meet? What doors does this specific course open that a neighbouring course does not?

There is also a problem with centralising careers support at university level.

A central careers service makes perfect operational sense. Students across an institution need access to coaching, job listings, employer events and interview preparation. But if essentially the same service is offered to every student, it gives candidates very little help in deciding which course or specialism to choose.

If every course page ultimately points towards the same central careers office, the university is effectively saying: choose the course on academic grounds now. We will help you work out what it was useful for later.

That may have been acceptable when degrees were cheaper, graduate employment was more predictable and the university credential itself did most of the signalling. It is much less persuasive when students are making one of the largest investments of their early lives into a labour market being reshaped by technology, AI and declining confidence in traditional graduate pathways.

Universities market subjects in detail but careers in aggregate. Students increasingly need the reverse: a clear explanation of how each particular course creates particular forms of opportunity.

The contrast with newer educational models is increasingly uncomfortable.

Oneday, a Brighteye portfolio company, offers programmes in which students build a real company with guidance from experienced entrepreneurs whilst completing an MBA. The company is the project; the qualification is almost the by-product. The content is inseparable from the outcome.

This model and others like it are not necessarily substitutes for universities and not every degree should become a startup accelerator. Education has value beyond employment, and turning every seminar into vocational training would be grim.

But newer institutions understand something traditional universities often resist: ambition shouldn't be considered a side effect of education. It is one of the reasons people pursue it.

Traditional business schools offer another clue as to where the wider university model may be heading. Programmes already treat employment outcomes, practitioner access, placement support and alumni relationships as central parts of the product rather than awkward extras.

That model is likely to become more typical across higher education. More courses will be delivered partly by people who have actually done the work being discussed: founders, investors, policymakers, operators, technologists and sector specialists, rather than only career academics describing industries from a safe distance. Students will expect more active placement support. They will want institutions to create introductions, broker projects, build apprenticeships and help them move towards specific roles and sectors.

Alumni networks will also have to become more than fundraising lists. A strong network should function as a living professional community: a source of mentorship, hiring, customers, collaborators, capital and opportunity. This has always been one of the real sources of value in top education and professional institutions, but it is too often left implicit, informal and unevenly distributed. Indeed, as briefly alluded to above, independent schools’ networks tend to live on and have greater impacts on careers than university networks (this is one of the premises of The 93% Club).

The universities that thrive will make these networks more active and accessible and connect them directly to the learning experience. The boundary between course, community and career will become much less clear. An observation on alumni networks from my experience is that they need to be utilised during courses when mentors can feel a part of the students’ journey as opposed to after graduation, when the student is the ‘final product’ - psychologically, it’s more compelling for a mentor to feel they can support and influence the ‘product’ than feeling like a rolodex… I believe this is part of the solution.

Asan Kurmanguzhin’s emerging New London School concept makes this explicit. Asan developed the idea while taking part in our founder studio at Brighteye. The concept is built around a more direct relationship between education and opportunity: practical skills, experienced practitioners, modern tools and close links to employers and industries. The skills, access, confidence and network are the main outcomes, rather than the certification…

Imagine a university saying that…

Imagine Cambridge presenting a degree not only through its papers and supervisions, but through the trajectories it can unlock. Imagine following alumni over ten or twenty years rather than until their first graduate scheme. Imagine showing students that careers are not six nouns in a bullet-point list, but evolving combinations of expertise, relationships, experiments and calculated risks.

Universities wonder why young people increasingly question the value of a degree. Part of the answer is staring at them from the bottom of their own course pages. Students deserve more than a curriculum followed by an afterthought; they deserve institutions that take their future as seriously as their entrance.