The Majors to Labor Market Initiative: Beginning to Bridge the Gap between Academic Programs and Student Expectations Webinar

Led by William A. Hamilton, Daniel E. Duerr, & Jeffrey M. Anderson of Saint Leo University.  The Office of Institutional Effectiveness (IE) is expanding its support of student success by integrating labor market information about pathways available to baccalaureate degree holders. This aligns with recent scholarship on student persistence, as well as with proposed changes at the Federal reporting level, and allows institutions to apply a market research lens to the study of student success. To understand the most promising avenues for this new area of work, we conducted two separate research studies. The first study explores how students use labor market information related to their academic majors—what we term as career relevant information (or CRI). Additionally, we identify how CRI is communicated to students. Our second study uses a content analysis of department websites from 100 institutions to identify common strategies used to communicate CRI and to find effective communication practices. Based on the findings from these two studies, we developed two tools to present this information to students: infographics for each degree that we offer and a dashboard (still in development) that provides students with a mechanism to make direct comparisons of degree programs. We discuss the development and application of these tools, describe how other institutions could replicate the project, and identify how we will evaluate this initiative.