Is College Preparing Students for Work?

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Is College Preparing Students for Work? Joshua.Bay Thu, 10/22/2026 - 03:00 AM CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez discusses embedding career readiness throughout college and why he calls himself the “patron saint of paid internships.” Byline(s) …

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Inside Higher Ed

As students and families increasingly question the value of a college education amid an uncertain job market, institutions are placing greater emphasis on career readiness and how they can better prepare students to succeed in the workforce.

Colleges are rethinking how to fit career preparation into the broader student experience, from integrating career exploration and professional development earlier in students’ academic journeys to strengthening connections between classroom learning and postgraduation opportunities.

Félix Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university system, joined Inside Higher Ed student success reporter Joshua Bay on Voices of Student Success to discuss how colleges can make career readiness a more integral part of the student experience, what CUNY hopes to accomplish through its recent $6.8 million expansion of CUNY Beyond and how higher education can better prepare students for a rapidly changing workforce as well as support their long-term success.

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Here are five key takeaways from Matos Rodríguez on how colleges can strengthen career preparation and better connect higher education to students’ long-term success.

1. Career readiness is becoming central to the value of a college degree.

“College is a place where you come to expand your mind, explore new possibilities … but while doing that, everybody is focused on what happens afterwards,” Matos Rodríguez said. “The question of the preparation for your professional or career future is extremely valid.”

He said it’s particularly important at CUNY, where roughly half of students were born outside the United States and many are second-generation immigrants or the first in their families to attend college.

“We do not think that it is inconsistent to be able to allow students to expand their horizons, think differently, meet people of different cultures and expand their knowledge while also being able to think about where they’re going to fit in the professional world, and to be as ready as one can be at the end of either two years if you’re in a community college or four years if you’re in a four-year school,” he said.

2. Career preparation should begin long before graduation.

Historically, career preparation has often been treated as something students engage with toward the end of college, whether through a career services office, an internship or a job search, Matos Rodríguez said.

That model is no longer sufficient, he said. In 2025, the university system launched CUNY Beyond to prioritize career exploration and outcomes by scaling practices designed to improve students’ employment prospects across its undergraduate campuses.

“This is change at scale,” Matos Rodríguez said. “What we want to do is make sure that all throughout the undergraduate journey, students are consistently being reminded about what comes next, and that they get a chance to explore what can come next in your courses with paid opportunities, internships, apprenticeships, things of that nature.”

The initiative is not intended to steer students toward particular careers or prioritize certain industries, he said. Rather, career preparation should be available to all students, whether they are pursuing nursing, computer science, teaching or history.

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The systemwide initiative initially launched at four institutions: Lehman College, Hunter College, Borough of Manhattan Community College and LaGuardia Community College. A recent expansion, supported by additional funding from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration, will bring the initiative to five more campuses, with the long-term goal of making career preparation a standard part of the CUNY student experience.

“At the end of this journey, we hope CUNY Beyond will disappear and this will just be the normal way in which we do our work in the university,” Matos Rodríguez said.

3. Colleges must prepare students for careers that don’t yet exist.

The rise of artificial intelligence raises questions about how colleges can prepare students for an increasingly unpredictable—and, to some extent, unimaginable—labor market, Matos Rodríguez said. Beyond equipping students with skills for today’s jobs, institutions must also prepare them to adapt as industries and workforce demands evolve.

“You’re going to be thinking about reinventing yourself professionally probably a number of times over your lifetime,” Matos Rodríguez said. “It might not be that all the things that you have, [CUNY] can provide you in two or four years.

“But what we will provide you is that you will know to be able to come to us if, in your journey, you need to be rethinking what skill set you might need for your next professional journey,” he added.

He pointed to an initiative at Baruch College designed to support midcareer students as an example of how institutions can help workers adapt to changing professional demands. Such efforts recognize that shifts in the labor market affect not only recent graduates but also those already established in their careers.

“No matter how good a job we do, change is so fast,” Matos Rodríguez said. “There’s going to be things that we do not cover right now, and what we need to do is give [students] the foresight that you should be always one step ahead of the market … so you’re not in a situation in which you get downsized, you get laid off, because there was a changing technology that makes what you were doing no longer needed.”

4. Career opportunities must be accessible to all students.

CUNY serves students from a wide range of backgrounds, including many who balance college with paid work, family obligations and financial pressures. Matos Rodríguez said ensuring that opportunities like internships, career exploration and professional networking are accessible to students who may lack the time, financial flexibility or personal connections to pursue them is central to the university system’s mission of advancing economic mobility.

“Most of our students do not have those connections. We need to be the place where they build that connection,” he said. “I like to be called the patron saint of paid internships for my CUNY students, because my CUNY students cannot do an internship for free. They need the resources, so we want to be able to make sure that they have access to that.”

Paid internships not only provide students with income to help cover food, transportation and other basic needs but also give them opportunities to explore potential career paths, Matos Rodríguez said. Just as importantly, early exposure to different fields can help students discover which careers may not be the right fit.

“We’re being very intentional about focusing on the paid side of internships because of the students that we serve [and] opening those doors of opportunities early on,” he said.

5. Student success shouldn’t end at graduation.

As more students gain work experience during college and enter the workforce after graduation, institutions need to rethink how they measure student success, Matos Rodríguez said. While postgraduation earnings can provide one measure of the return on investment of a college education, salary alone may not fully capture students’ career goals and longer-term outcomes.

“We’re trying to figure out … measurements that are both aspirational for us [and] help us do better on behalf of our students,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done, but it is something that higher ed will need to take a look at more seriously.”

Beyond measuring outcomes, making career readiness a standard part of the college experience also requires institutions to engage and train faculty and other campus stakeholders, he said. That broader commitment can help ensure students have opportunities to explore different career paths and make informed decisions about their futures.

“This is about giving students full access to opportunity and exposure, so they make decisions based on their passions, on where they are and what they want to do at the end of their journey,” he said.

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