Proving the Value of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of AI

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

I don’t care if a senior is employed after graduation. I care that they’re employable. I want to know that they have the capabilities to continue to reinvent themselves over and over again. That’s career management skillsets. But of course, the other risk that they need to mitigate is finding just meaning and purpose in their work. In order to flourish as humans, students will need to find work in which they find purpose and where their values align with the mission of the organization, but that’s another risk they have to mitigate as they go.

So rather than thinking in terms of this is the major and this is the industry and this is the job, helping students think in terms of, okay, well, where are the opportunities today? How do my values align with the mission of these organizations? What are the skills that I’ve developed that I could be offering? And just take a very different approach to this whole process, knowing that they’re going to have to build those professional connections and their resume to be iterating and redoing this whole process over and over again.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. And today I am joined by Dr. Sharon Belden Castonguay the executive director of the Gordon Career Center at Wesleyan University. Thank you for being here, Sharon.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Thank you for having me back, Meredith.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m so glad to have you back. For those who have been following along for a while, Sharon was one of our OG guests back in 2023, so I am very excited to have her back and check in on what’s new in the last few years. And I am excited to talk to you today, Sharon, about proving the value of a liberal arts education in the age of AI. Very timely topic, and one that I know you are very passionate and knowledgeable about from your many years leading career services in a liberal arts institution, and then also your personal experience studying at two liberal arts institutions with your undergrad at Smith and then your doctorate at Harvard.

And at this point, I think we have all seen the attacks on liberal arts institutions and programs and the intense scrutiny as parents, students, lawmakers, and the general public question the ROI of a liberal arts education, especially when the tech heavy buzzword and AI are so heavily influencing the job market right now.

So I am sure you have seen it all in the Gordon Career Center there at Wesleyan. And I’m excited to hear how you’re thinking through all of this as a career services leader and just as a longtime leader in the liberal arts space. But before I get into my question, Sharon, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at Wesleyan?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Just to say that while I am kind of known now for my work in the liberal arts environment, the first half of my long career in career development and in career services was actually in big research universities working with professional and graduate students. So I do have a lot of exposures to students who are studying business, who are getting PhDs, who are law students coming from that.

And the reason that I came to a liberal arts environment was to fix some of the problems I was seeing at the graduate level. What I saw was a lot of students that were getting graduate degrees because they didn’t like their first job out of college, and they were sort of lost and confused and they decided to go even further into debt to get this graduate degree. And I’m an adult developmental psychologist by training. And developmentally, I just thought, wow, there’s a lot happening here. And to go back to work with undergraduates, and then with liberal arts graduates specifically, because I’m really passionate about that type of education. So for those who are working at various public and private big research universities, know that I’m familiar with that universe as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Because you got your master’s at Michigan, right?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

I did. Yeah. And then I worked at Baruch College before Wesleyan, which is part of the City University of New York system.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So yeah, you have seen it all.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Oh yes.

Meredith Metsker:

Love that. That’s some good context, Sharon. Now, before I get into the more specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with the question I ask all of our guests, and I know you’ve gotten this question before, but what does career everywhere mean to you?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Yeah, and it’s always a great question. When you first had me on the pod, I think I talked about a bit the need for the whole campus to help students connect the dots between everything that they’re learning inside and outside the classroom. And particularly in the liberal arts environment, that’s really important because the major does not necessarily match the outcome.

So it’s really about helping students develop a narrative about everything that they’re learning through, yes, their academics, but also their internships, their extracurriculars, their campus employment, their activism, their athletics, all of these things and how it comes together. All of that is still true. But if you ask me now, how is that morphed for you? What does career everywhere mean to you now? I think what we really have to do is examine that word career. And I’m going to read a couple of stats for you.

The World Economic Forum is saying that, by 2030, 92 million jobs will be displaced, and 170 million will be created. So I’ve been saying a lot, especially through the work I do with our admission office, I’ve been in this world for almost 30 years. If I don’t know what the jobs are going to be when the first year graduates, nobody else does either. And if we’re going to sit here and think about coaching students to have five-year plans, or to be thinking about how their major meets an outcome to have a successful career in the future, if we don’t know what those jobs are going to be, how can we possibly do that?

That really what we need to be thinking about is broadly educating students so that they’re able to learn new things very quickly, and they’re learning how to navigate change and they’re learning to think in really interdisciplinary ways. So instead of choosing a career to prep for and then to start, it’s about deciding what do you want to learn next? What do you have to offer an employer of interest? How would you leverage that experience for the next opportunity?

So then to go back to your question, well then what does career everywhere mean? It means is everyone on your campus on the same page about having those conversations with students? That it’s not about simply asking what do you want to do after you graduate and siphoning them into specific majors. It requires having a much deeper conversation with students about how they’re navigating all the different things your university has to offer to reach a short-term outcome after graduation that they can continue to build on and iterate over time.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. And that makes a lot of sense. And I kind of loved your point about how can we help students make a five-year plan if we have no idea what the job market’s going to look like in five years. And it kind of made me reflect on my career journey a little bit because I have never had a five-year plan. I don’t know if that’s normal or not, but I have never had the five-year, ten-year plan, or even like a dream job. I just always knew what are some key values and key things that I want in a job, and that’s how I have guided my career so far. Like for me, storytelling has been a number one. Where can I talk to interesting people like you and tell great stories and interesting stories that matter? So yeah, it just kind of made me reflect on that a little bit.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

And you mentioned storytelling. It’s interesting because I think one of the key things that people all over campus can be doing going to career everywhere is getting students to tell their story, and then helping them to tell their story in such a way that helps them connect the dots with all the things that they’re doing. And then helps potential employers, graduate programs, whoever might be interested in them next, see where all of the dots connect because no one is going to be having a linear journey anymore.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, right, right. And I think that’s a great segue into our topic today, which is again about proving the value of a liberal arts education in the age of AI. And so for the sake of time, I’m just going to get right into it and ask you this question, Sharon, what is the value of a liberal arts education, especially in light of this AI era that we’re in right now?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Well, I think the first thing we need to do is define our terms a little bit, because I think liberal arts means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And it means neither liberal nor necessarily arts. It doesn’t mean liberal in the political sense. It doesn’t mean you’re only studying the arts. We talk about on our campus more pursuing a liberal education, but by that, what we really mean is a broad education. That you’re taking classes in a lot of different seemingly disparate things and learning to make these interdisciplinary connections between them. We tend to attract the kind of student that is eager to do that. Almost half our students double major, even those who don’t are likely adding minors and certificates. And often in really disparate things.

We like to laugh that a typical Wesleyan student, if there is one, is something like a physics and art history major who’s taking a class in Korean drumming and just completed an internship on Wall Street. These things that on other campuses might be like, what’s the through line there? The student seems really lost and confused. For us, it makes perfect sense because in a liberal arts environment, this is exactly what we want them to do. Because they’re going to see all of these connections between all of these different things that they’re learning that’s going to make them better at what it is they end up doing.

So if they’re going to do that internship in investment banking one summer, they’re going to be better than everybody else because they’re able to make all of these connections through all of these classes that they’re taking. And I do think this is what makes them better off on the job market. Because when we talk to our alumni, why do they come back and recruit? We do a lot of recruiting efforts among our peer schools within our NESCAC athletic conference. We’ve seen a real growth in recruiting. It’s all NESCAC recruiting.

And I think part of that is because these alums as a whole are saying, “We understand what we got out of our education. We know that a student who went to any of these schools who got this type of education is going to be really good at coming into our organization and hitting the ground running.” And yet, when you look at a lot of universities, they’re still working in sort of this lockstep, academics need to lead to specific career. And you get a lot of academic and career advising that all tries to align really closely.

And I think for some students, this makes sense, to be clear. So if you have a student, for instance, whose two great passions in life since they were a young child are airplanes and math, and they know for absolute certain they want to be an aeronautical engineer, Wesleyan is not the place for them. We do not offer aeronautical engineering. They’re not going to be happy here. I’m not saying that this is for everybody. But again, I’m going to put on my psychologist hat, on all of my professional experience, it is a minority of high school students, because we work with traditionally aged students for the most part. An 18-year-old does not know for a fact that they want to be an aeronautical engineer most of the time, some of the time. And you will get these small populations of students who have, they know, they’ve always known.

But I find what happens more often is that students get forced to say things that adults want to hear. “I want to be a doctor,” this kind of thing. And then they get positive reception to that. So they just kind of keep going and keep going and keep going until they find themselves working in something that they’re really unhappy with. So I think we need to really rethink this whole paradigm of how are we connecting academics with career so that they’re not completely disconnected. We want to make sure that students are well prepared for the job market, while also recognizing that it doesn’t need to be lockstep major equals outcome. There are other ways for students to be gaining that relevant experience.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I’m kind of curious, so tying this specifically to, of course, this AI age that we’re in right now, for lack of a better phrase, in your mind, so what are some of those specific benefits from the liberal arts education that students can take into a workforce that is just like changing on a daily basis, especially with AI?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Well, I think what they’re learning is allowing them to navigate change, first of all. So in other words, if they’re not being prepared for any one specific career, that means that when the job market changes, even during the four years that they’re here, they’re able to pivot quickly and shift into something else without actually losing time because their major was never actually directly aligned with their outcome in the first place.

So they’re thinking, okay, well, maybe I thought I would go into say that entry level coding job that now no longer exists. Now I’m realizing that that job doesn’t exist anymore. Now I’m going to pivot into something else. So we were seeing a lot of gloom and doom this year in the media about the class of ’25. The class of ’25’s going to be a disaster, none of them are going to get jobs. And I’m in there working on the data for the class of ’25. And I can tell you if anything, it’s a little better than it was for the class of ’24. Because our students were able to pivot and move away from the things that weren’t hiring and were still really good candidates for the areas that were.

I think the other thing that our students are really good at is when you think about the AI augmentation that you’re seeing in a lot of these job descriptions, it’s not that students need to be the computer science major that are AI forward and have taken all these classes in it or something. That’s not what you’re seeing in the job descriptions. But it’s something like a marketing internship where they want to know that you’ve designed prompts so they’re going to get at the things that you need to do a really good job in that marketing internship.

But if you look at the Handshake data, and anecdotally this bears out on campus, most students, I think they were reporting something like 80% of students they surveyed, they’re already using these tools. They already have a good sense of how to use them. So they might need to get more fine-tuned, say in an internship or a job shadow kind of opportunity about, well, I’m using these tools over here for this kind of thing, maybe in a class or through my own, in my personal life to write recipes or something, whatever. How can I shift and understand how to use those on the job? But it’s going to be a pretty easy transition. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing on the ground is that students already have a lot of what they need for these AI augmented positions.

Where I think the liberal arts education comes into play is that, of course, we’ve all used these tools, and you know you get a lot of garbage from a lot of it. You have to be able to pick through and figure out what works and what doesn’t, what can I believe? What do I not believe? Where do I stress test? How do I continue to ask the questions that make sure that I have something that’s actually usable, and I’m not just handing the results to my boss and presenting that as my work product.

Our students aren’t going to do that because what they’re taught to do is to think critically about every single thing that they’re doing. And to really think hard about, okay, what is it that I’m presenting and what does this represent? And have I already critically picked this apart? Can I defend it to my boss the way I would’ve had to my professor? This kind of thing. So I do think that, even though we’re talking about entry level jobs, people think of it, the students are going to have to get more technical because of AI, or the jobs are going to go away. We’re not really seeing either of those things. We’re seeing that the jobs are still there. There’s some AI augmentation, but that our students are pretty well prepared to get there.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. Yeah. So it’s less about teaching the technical skills because, like you said, a lot of your students are already kind of figuring that out on their own anyway, but it’s more about in what scenarios can you use AI? What are its strengths, its limitations, the ethical issues surrounding it.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

How do humans interact with that kind of technology?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

And our students think really hard and deeply about the ethical implications of a lot of this. And you see that play out amongst themselves. You see that play out in classroom discussions 100%.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, earlier you mentioned some that you have been looking at data recently that’s kind of showing that your students are doing just fine basically in this job market. So I would love to hear more about how you’re kind of seeing some of these trends play out at Wesleyan in terms of the benefits of liberal arts education in the age of AI.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Yeah. And it’s interesting because people are sending me articles about the gloom and doom type stuff and reading some of the coverage and picking it apart. One of the things I noticed is that you see a report, the reporters go out and talk to students and the students say, “I applied to 300 jobs, or I applied to even dozens of jobs and I didn’t get one interview or I got two interviews and they didn’t go very well.” Those of us who work in career centers, we see I applied to hundreds of jobs. Okay, well clearly you’re not managing your job search very well. It’s buckshot method. Even in a great job market, you’re probably not going to do very well because you’re not managing your job search very effectively.

So I mean, I think how are we helping students manage their job search more effectively is thinking about how are we leveraging some of these tools ourselves, and not just AI, but all the tools we have at our disposal. So a good example is the collections function in Handshake, which is relatively new. We were an early adopter of that. And having each of our industry specific advisors going in there and working with our employer relations team and curating some of what was coming in to Handshake into the collections and then having those specific collections feed into the industry pages of our uConnect site with a disclaimer that this is not all encompassing. If you’re looking for a job as a paralegal before you go to law school, this is not going to be exhaustive, but our law advisor has gone in there and has looked at some positions where she’s thinking, okay, based on geography, based on firms where we’ve had a previous relationship where we know we have alums, we’re going to highlight these positions.

So using some of these tools ourselves to help students with the curation while also teaching them how do you do this research on your own because they all have their own values of what they need in a job or an internship. So how are they using say Gemini or ChatGPT, or whatever tool they want to use? We tend to be a Google forward school here at Wesleyan. So we encourage Gemini because we know they have access to it.

But thinking about how are you using these tools for things like organization research, industry research, coming up with your own list of potential employers that fit whatever that north star that you have. I know I want to be in Boston, or I know I want this size organization, or they have to share these other values that I have. So really thinking about how are ways that we can coach students on using these tools effectively.

And then thinking about, taking another step back, like how is Wesleyan as an institution thinking about AI? I wear two hats. Obviously I’m a staff member. I run the career office. I have staff who report to me, but I also teach. So I see it through both lenses. And Wesleyan has a program where people like myself can nominate staff to participate in a deep dive workshop with somebody from our IT office to really get in deep with some of these AI tools with a specific project in mind.

So we had a staff member do that. And she ended up coming up with a way of automating matching for a virtual mentor program that we run during winter break where we’ve been seeing just enormous growth. So to try to match well over 200 alumni with many hundreds of students and trying to do that like hand matching on a spreadsheet wasn’t going to work anymore. So she figured out how to use some of these tools herself to do that kind of matching. And then she’s now presenting that, not just to folks on my team, but to people all over the university. Like what are some best practice cases on becoming more efficient with your work, getting everybody on board with using these types of tools in different ways?

From the faculty side, our Center for Faculty Career Development has been doing a lot of workshops and scaffolding to help faculty think productively about how can we integrate some of these tools into the classroom so that students do feel like I am getting what I need so that when I go onto that interview for an internship, I can say with confidence that I’ve used these tools in an academic setting.

So I teach a first year seminar in the spring. I’ve already lined up one of our librarians to come in to help students with how can I use these tools specifically towards doing academic research for my literature review for this course that’s due at the end of the semester. I’m also going to be integrating some in class exercises over the course of the semester of helping students use different props to kind of stress test different topics that we’re doing in the class as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that all sounds really comprehensive. And I always love when people kind of share examples of how they’re working AI into curriculum, into career services education and programming. So that’s super helpful. And kind of on that note, as a career services leader there at Wesleyan, how do you go about measuring and proving the value of a liberal arts education? Again, I know that’s a hot topic these days.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

It is. And I mean, I think a lot of it becomes around how transparent are you with your outcomes? Because for a lot of us, honestly, the outcomes speak for themselves. That’s not just Wesleyan, but we see that at a lot of pure liberal arts colleges. Our outcomes are strong and they’re consistently strong, but there’s some hesitation to talk about that. The culture of a lot of our campuses tend to be so purely academic at times that being really outcomes forward in our messaging can sometimes run counter to your culture.

So it really becomes incumbent on the career office, to go into that career everywhere model, are you developing the relationships with the people around campus and the communications office and the admission office, within academic affairs even, to be giving them tangible outcomes, information, both qualitative and quantitative? Because I really do think you need both. You need data to demonstrate that the return on investment is there, but then you also need the stories because you need to prove that… And one of the big things I always have to prove is that major does not equal outcome.

So I have a slide, for instance, that I love to show when I’m giving presentations to prospective families, as well as current parents, that has a list of first jobs of Wesleyan students. These were actual first destination outcomes, and then I asked them to guess the major, and then I bring up what the major actually was, and it’s-

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s fun.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

… just completely different, right? And it’s to really illustrate. And even for people who think they understand what this type of education is, they may even be an alum themselves. Seeing it really just in black and white, seeing that disconnect is really powerful.

So one of the ways that we try to do that on our website, for instance, is we do try to be transparent in our data and our career outcomes. We’re looking at beefing that up even more over time. Like right now it’s a little surface. We’re going to be looking at going much deeper into that over the next year or so. But the other thing that we do is we have profiles of alums, but also current students, particularly through their campus employment opportunities, or if they’ve received a summer grant from us, we’ll have profiles on our website of those students. And we have right in their kind of card, right in their profile, it’s like name, major, and then what they were doing so that it’s really clear that that major, the student has this major label, but then whatever that other thing was that they were doing that we’re looking to highlight has nothing to do with what the major is a good portion of the time. So we’re constantly looking for ways to have these proof points.

And then our advancement office, our admission office, our comms are the ones that do this kind of front facing communications piece. They’re always looking at leveraging alumni to answer these questions like in videos, how did you use your Wesleyan education? And that messaging is always really consistent around, it was the breadth of the education that I had that made me successful, even though what I’m doing now had nothing to do with what I was doing then.

One of the best videos that I saw really recently, it got posted on LinkedIn, I think by our communications office was the actor, Bradley Whitford, who some of you might know from the West Wing fame, though he’s done like a million other things, including pretty recently. But he’s an alum. He’s great. But he did a video basically talking about exactly that, that it’s this type of education really lends itself to that breadth that you need for success today.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. Love that. And he’s a great actor for sure.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Great guy too. I know him.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m curious, has messaging from the career center, or maybe even from Wesleyan as a whole, has it changed in the last couple years at all around this kind of AI topic, or even just in response to concerns about tuition costs and worry about AI and everything in the job market? I’m just curious.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

I don’t think the nature of the messaging has changed. I think that I’m being brought to the table a lot more often to provide those proof points and to become part of that storytelling. Because I mean, the closer we get to 100 grand a year for tuition and fees and room and board-

Meredith Metsker:

Oof.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Woof what is right. We’re very, very close. And I’ve been saying for a long time that once we tick up over that mark, you’re going to hear it a lot more.

And certainly what we’re seeing, and I think this is a difference from when I started here at Wesleyan 12 years ago, we do have families who pay that. We have plenty who don’t, to be clear. Almost half our students are on need-based financial aid, but that still leaves plenty of families who are paying that kind of money. And even those who can easily afford it, still want to see return on investment.

And that I think is much more true now than it used to be, that you’re needing to prove yourself even for very wealthy families who want to see… It’s still an investment no matter how rich you are, right? 100K a year is 100K a year. And they want to know that that return on investment is going to be there. And so I’m being brought to the table more and more often to demonstrate that, but we’re able to do that successfully. I mean, our enrollment remains strong, our application numbers remain strong.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. And you were saying earlier that you were actually seeing better outcomes, what, in 2025 versus-

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Slightly up.

Meredith Metsker:

… previous years?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

We’re very consistent with the exception of 2020-

Meredith Metsker:

Well, yeah.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

… which I don’t need to tell you why.

Meredith Metsker:

Everything blew up for-

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Everything-

Meredith Metsker:

… everyone everywhere.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

… blew up. No, it’s interesting because all the years that I’ve been at Wesleyan, our outcomes have been extremely consistent in terms of the percentage of the class that’s either employed in graduate school, in long-term volunteer work, this kind of thing after graduation. Our career outcome rate is high and consistent. So when I say it’s up, it’s going to be up by maybe two percentage points or something.

And when I looked at the class of ’20, what was really interesting was it was not consistent across industry. That you could really point to the industries that affected those overall outcomes. And it was because we’re so broad in where our students go, that in a typical year, even if one industry is affected, the students just quickly pivot and do something else, and everything kind of comes out in the wash in terms of the outcome. And we just had, you think about the industries that just got hit really hard during the pandemic, some of these students just… And it hit so quickly that they just didn’t have the time or wherewithal to pivot, or what they might have pivoted to was also not hiring because you had so many industries that just kind of were paralyzed during that period of time.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. Well, you mentioned that you’re brought to the table a lot more now, which is super awesome to hear. And I know from our past conversations that one of the ways that manifests is that you often present to prospective students and parents as part of the admissions process. So I’m curious, of course, we’ve talked about the high cost of tuition and making that case, I guess, to prospective students and parents. I’m curious, what do you say when you talk to them and they ask you that question, what’s the ROI?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Yeah. It’s interesting because what this really comes down to, because I’ve actually started giving talks at secondary schools, independent secondary schools in particular as well, because what I’m finding is these schools that tend to send students to schools like Wesleyan and have really robust college counseling, they can’t always answer the questions that they get around what is going to be the return on investment. The admission folks struggle a little bit, the college counselors struggle a little bit sometimes.

And at the end of the day, listening to the concerns of these families is what they’re really looking for is stability for their kids. I’m a parent, I get it. I have a teenager who’s about to start this whole process. You want your kids to be safe. You want to find stability. And people continue to think in terms of what is the school? What is the major? It’s not just about return on investment because we’re spending this money. It’s is my kid going to be safe from all of the madness? Because I’m in the workforce and I’m seeing what’s happening in my industry, in my organization, and I am terrified for my child. So I am trying to find the safe haven.

So a lot of my messaging is, you need to get over it. There is no such thing as safety or stability anymore. And what’s interesting is that it’s not just the parents. Handshake has interesting data on this as well that suggests that the one thing that college students really highly value in potential employers is job stability.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I don’t blame them.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Well, I don’t blame them either, but they’re also not going to get it. So I’m looking to the side here because I wrote down some of these numbers. Among the class of ’25 grads that they surveyed, so from the class of ’25, 43% thought they’d experience at least one career pivot, but 38% said they anticipated working in the same type of job for their whole career. That’s terrifying because they’re not.

Meredith Metsker:

And unlikely. Yeah.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

They’re not. And I think a lot of universities are so set in this idea that we have to track students into these major programs that we have. We have to attract them into this institution so that we can track them into these majors, to track them into these career outcomes, to maybe meet the demand of a workforce that’s going to exist four years from now, even though we don’t really know what that is. And everybody is chasing safety and stability that simply doesn’t exist.

So I think that if we took a step back and just acknowledged that and focus on how can we help students research and understand market trends so that when they’re considering should I take this internship, should I take this first job after graduation? Well, do they understand how to mitigate risk? Do I understand how this organization makes their money? Do I understand the threats to this industry right now? What value can I add to this organization? What can I learn? What value is this going to add to my resume? What is my exit strategy? If they go out of business in six months, or if I just get laid off in six months, where am I going to go? Am I going to have the time to build the professional relationships I need to have to stay employable?

I am very fond of saying on my campus that I don’t care if a senior is employed after graduation. I care that they’re employable. I want to know that they have the capabilities to continue to reinvent themselves over and over again. That’s career management skillsets. But of course, the other risk that they need to mitigate is finding just meaning and purpose in their work. In order to flourish as humans, students will need to find work in which they find purpose and where their values align with the mission of the organization, but that’s another risk they have to mitigate as they go.

So rather than thinking in terms of this is the major and this is the industry and this is the job, helping students think in terms of, okay, well, where are the opportunities today? How do my values align with the mission of these organizations? What are the skills that I’ve developed that I could be offering? And just take a very different approach to this whole process, knowing that they’re going to have to build those professional connections and their resume to be iterating and redoing this whole process over and over again.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. How do the parents respond when you kind of give them that message?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Surprisingly well, if you want to think of it that way. Because honestly, once it gets laid out for them, it aligns with what they’re seeing on the ground in their own organizations and in their own careers. When you put it that way, you start to see a lot of nods. Oh yeah, I get it now. Because when they think about what are they seeing with entry level positions in their own offices, are they seeing them thrive? Are they seeing them grow? Are they seeing them go away? When people are leaving, where are they going? They’re starting to look themselves at what does a career trajectory look like and realizing that it’s not linear anymore. And probably wasn’t for them, to be clear. I mean, I wrote my dissertation on Gen Xers and they didn’t have linear careers either. So it’s not really a shock to the parents of the current college students because, when they think back on their own careers, it was really that linear either.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me that they respond well because I was thinking too, if I was in their shoes, I would appreciate that someone’s just being real with me. Because I think so often, especially in higher ed, you just kind of get that institutional language, ivory tower language. And it’s like, sometimes we just need to lay it out, be real. Of course, still make your case and share your great outcomes. And of course, Wesleyan has a great reputation, which helps. But yeah, I think if I was a parent, I would feel a lot of relief knowing that the leader of career services at this institution really gets it, really understands the current workforce, and has more nuance in the approach of preparing their student.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Well, and when it comes to the fear and loathing around AI, I like to do a thought exercise. I actually did this with our trustees recently where I said, “Raise your hand if you’re Gen X.” And they all sort of laughed and a bunch of hands went up. That’s about the age of trustees now, just as it’s about the age of parents, of current traditional age college students. And I say, “Okay, remember in the ’90s when the internet started to become a thing, and because you were under 30, you were expected to be the one who understood everything about it. You might’ve been asked to design the first webpage for your organization or to start vending these internet vendors that were trying to sell you things to improve your office operations. And you didn’t know any more about it than your boss, but you were 25.”

And I get a lot of nods of understanding among that particular set of people. And I say, “It’s like that now. That’s really what’s happening with young people and AI.” It’s happening so fast that everyone is kind of learning in real time just like when the internet became a thing. And it’s not that you need the degree in computer science, going back to what I was saying earlier, but young people are learning what they need to be learning in general.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That was making me flashback to when I worked as a reporter in the newspaper and I was 22, first-job out of college. And the editors were like, “Can you just handle our Facebook? You know Facebook, right? You can just do our social media.” And I was like, “I guess.” Sure.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Right. Whoever the youngest person in the office is automatically assumed to know the most about whatever the new tech thing is. [inaudible 00:38:50].

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That was certainly the case. Well, you’ve kind of touched on this a little bit, but on a similar note, it does seem like a lot of the challenges and the scrutiny around a liberal arts education right now in this age of AI sort of stems from a lot of misunderstandings and misperceptions. So as a longtime leader in the higher ed liberal arts space, how do you think liberal arts institutions and programs can better tell their story and prove that ROI?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Yeah, I think it really comes down to storytelling, but with a lot of quantitative data to back it up. Because you’ll have different audiences that will respond to different proof points. And I do think it’s about, going back to career everywhere, there also needs to be like messaging everywhere. You need to have alignment between what your communications office, your admission office, your advancement office, the career, like what is everybody putting out and isn’t consistent in that messaging about what is, not just the value of a liberal arts education, but how are you differentiating yourself as an institution within that environment? What is the specific value you add? How are you demonstrating that with alumni and student profile storytelling while not ignoring the quantitative proof points that many families need now to kind of get them over whatever resistance they may have towards that type of education?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And that is a theme I hear from a lot of folks on this podcast is it’s data and stories. It’s not one or the other. They have to work in tandem. So again, you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier too, but as the career services leader there at Wesleyan, how do you and your team help students connect the dots between their liberal arts education and then today’s AI influenced job market?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Yeah, no, helping students connect the dots, period, regardless what the job market is one of our core responsibilities, frankly, at the end of the day. And because we’re a small institution, our bread and butter is one-on-one advising. I realize that’s not possible in all institutions. Not everybody has the staff to be able to do that. But we really, we do over 200 programs a year, but a lot of those programs are to get students in the door for one-on-one advising. And we’re really encouraging students to be developing those relationships from day one, whether it be with our peer career advisors, eventually graduating up to our professional, more industry specific advisors along the way.

And those conversations are not always, they might get to that point, but they’re not just this transactional, show me your resume, what are the classes you’re taking? How does X lead to Y? It’s who are you and what do you want out of life? It’s this really deeper dive into getting to know the student, understanding their motivations. And I realize that it’s a privilege and a luxury to be able to have the time and the staffing to be able to go into that. And it’s hard. These are hard conversations. You’re exhausted by the end of the day if you’re spending all day having those conversations.

But we really feel strongly that, not only that we need to be doing that, but we also need to be helping others on campus understand that those conversations need to happen. They don’t need to happen with us. And this goes to career everywhere as well. How can we give others on campus the tools that they need to be having these deeper conversations with students as well?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m curious, I know you do a lot of those one-on-one conversations. Does the AI stuff come up a lot in those from students right now or do you do any programming specific to that?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

AI is a tool that students can use in a lot of different ways. We’re getting close to going live with a new page on our website. Hopefully by the time this episode drops, we’ll have that page live and you can put it in the show notes, where I’m trying to bring together a lot of information to help students think about AI at work, whether that’s articles about what’s happening in the job market, advice about how to navigate their career, different videos, and forage opportunities that help them make use of some of these tools in a project setting, things along those lines to kind of have it all in one place.

But we’re not really having conversations about AI as this big separate looming thing. It’s a tool, it’s something they’re going to have to learn, it’s something they’re going to have to use, and it’s going to be one more thing that is going to affect what’s already a turbulent dynamic job market. I mean, I think we need to keep in mind as well when we’re thinking about what are all of the things that are affecting the job market, AI is only one of those things. There are a lot of things messing with the job market right now, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Yep.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

But we’re always going to have economic fluctuations. We’re always going to have policy decisions that affect hiring in different ways. There’s always going to be something. You’re in the job market long enough yourself, you know that there’s always going to be something. And helping students see that is AI going to affect the job market in different ways? Absolutely. Is it going to affect how they do their job in different ways? Absolutely. Can we tell them exactly how that’s going to play out? Nope.

So I mean, a good example there is radiology. If you go back 10 minutes, there was all of this gloom and doom around, oh, no one’s going to need radiologists anymore because AI is doing all of the reading of the films and no one is going to need the professional radiologist. It’s a dying breed, blah, blah, blah. Well, what’s happened is actually the exact opposite. The New York Times, I think it was, did something about this recently talking about how, yes, there is a lot of use of AI. If you look at the field of medicine, a lot of what is happening with AI is being applied to radiology, but what this has meant is more radiologists, not few radiologists. But no one would’ve anticipated that back at the beginning.

And I think trying to second guess or think that we as career professionals need to be telling students, “Do this, don’t do that because AI is coming for you.” Do we know? Not really. And trying to tell students, “You should do this thing,” when you don’t actually know what that outcome is, it’s like asking them to put all their money into one stock instead of a diversified fund. I think if I were to use the business translation of what we’re trying to do in a liberal arts environment is we want an index fund. We want students to be investing-

Meredith Metsker:

Diversify your portfolio.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

… [inaudible 00:45:54] market. Instead of putting all their chips in NVIDIA, you might do really well with NVIDIA right now, but no one really knows where that’s going to be in 10 years.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Like I said, it’s diversifying your portfolio.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Diversifying your portfolio.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, Sharon, you’ve offered a lot of great insights already, but is there any additional advice you’d like to give to other career services leaders in liberal arts institutions right now?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

I mean, just hold the line. I find that taking a defensive posture with liberal arts doesn’t really go very well, that it really should be about not defending what you’re doing, but really saying, “This is actually the safest thing you can do.” If we go back to what’s really worrying people is safety and stability, I feel very firmly that the safest education you can have right now is a liberal arts education. Because if you don’t know what the jobs are going to be so that you need to be flexible and you need to be able to learn new things quickly and you need to be able to connect the dots, this is in fact the safest thing that you can do. And to own that narrative and to be proactive with that narrative rather than taking the defensive posture.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s great advice. Well, is there anything else you would like to add before I kind of start our closing segments?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

I will let you start your closing segment.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well, Sharon, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

If they want to connect with me, they can certainly do so through LinkedIn. I’m also easily found on our website in terms of if you want my email address and do something specific that way. If you want to know more just about my philosophy around career development, I would refer people to my TEDx Talk, which is a bit old now, but we’ll brush it off. It did hit a million views this past year, so I was really excited-

Meredith Metsker:

Whoa.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

… about that. And if they want to hear more about Wesleyan as an office and how we do things within the institution, I would refer them back to the track I did with you three years ago. I think everything I said there is still accurate except for our reporting structure. I talked then about reporting to the provost. We were within academic affairs. We’re now with the president’s office.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, cool. I will be sure to include links to all of those things so folks can check it out. And also congrats on a million views. That’s awesome. All right. Well, at the end of every interview, as you know, we do an answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Dr. Matt Cowley of Virginia Tech, and he left this question for you. What is a skill or a piece of knowledge from a different field or discipline outside of higher education that you believe has been instrumental to your success?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

So it’s funny, given that we’ve been talking about AI because I’m going to go all the way back to high school. I went to a suburban public high school, very kind of middle of the road kind of place. And I took two years of computer science in the ’80s.

Meredith Metsker:

Nice.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

But I found that having that baseline knowledge of how computers work and how computer language works, which is really all I got from those two years, has actually been really important for me because I learn new tech really easily. If you hand a new platform or a new way of building a website or… So actually good for instance is I have two classes here at Wesleyan where we use portfolios for different assignments. And I found out the day I came back from break that the portfolio vendor I’d been using went out of business.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s what you want right after the break.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

That’s what you want to find out right before classes start. So I had completely start over with a completely different platform, rebuilding everything very, very quickly. But I found that just by having that high school experience, I dive into those things and get there a little faster than the average person my age.

Meredith Metsker:

I love it. That’s a great example. Well, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Oh gosh. So I’m going to continue on the theme of AI. And since we’re on that topic, I will ask to the next person, what has been the most impactful use case of AI on your office’s operations?

Meredith Metsker:

Ooh, I like that one. That’s a good one. I’m sure we’ll get lots of good answers. I want to ask that to everybody. Maybe I’ll put that as a question in the Career Everywhere community.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

There you go.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Well, that’s a great question, Sharon. And just thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today and for the second time. It was really fun to have you back and hear what’s new and how you’re thinking through proving the value of a liberal arts education right now. So thank you again for taking the time to share your wisdom.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

Nice to be back. Thanks for having me.