This fall, two of my nephews began their first year at the University of Michigan. I spoke with them at length as they contemplated where to attend, and ultimately they chose Michigan—the same place where, many years ago, I began my own undergraduate journey. Watching them take these vital first steps into higher education has offered a unique lens through which to examine the evolving landscape of student success, modern pedagogy, and the ultimate purpose of a university education.
As they embark on their own learning journeys, I am struck by how different their experiences will be from mine. Today’s incoming undergraduates will have vastly more ways to explore their interests, encounter prospective employers, build complex capabilities, and deliberately connect classroom learning with real-world work. Yet, with this cornucopia of opportunity comes a distinct set of pressures. They will also face a far more complex set of choices—and a world of work that will inevitably change dramatically between their very first day on campus and their eventual graduation day.
As I consider what I hope they will experience over the next four years, my thoughts naturally turn to what universities fundamentally owe them and every other student walking across campus. Institutions must provide not simply a collection of more opportunities, but a deeply developmental journey that enables students to make increasingly informed decisions and learn meaningfully from the choices they make.
In the first column in this series, I argued that career readiness cannot simply wait until graduation day. Since then, educators, employers, and university leaders have responded with rich examples of how they are already actively connecting academic learning and practical work. Their thoughtful responses reinforced a central point worthy of further reflection: An early encounter with an authentic problem does much more than merely prepare a student for a future job. It can fundamentally transform how that student experiences everything that follows in their academic career.
A student who has seen disciplinary knowledge applied out in the real world invariably returns to the classroom with entirely different questions. Abstract concepts acquire immediate context. Productive struggle gains a clear and compelling purpose. The student begins to understand where their learning might actually lead them and how they might contribute meaningfully to society and industry.
That realization suggests a much more ambitious goal than simply ensuring every graduating student secures a traditional internship. What if, instead, undergraduate students encountered dozens of progressively challenging opportunities to connect their learning and work throughout the entirety of their undergraduate education?
True career readiness should never be treated as an assortment of disconnected programs clustered haphazardly around graduation. Rather, it should be thoroughly developmental: students should continuously explore possibilities, exercise increasing levels of agency, tackle authentic problems, and learn how to explain and reconsider their choices along the way.
One Internship Can’t Do It All
Internships are undeniably and extraordinarily valuable. They provide students with meaningful professional experience, valuable professional relationships, greater self-confidence, and a much clearer vision of where they want to go next in their careers. However, a stark reality remains: not every student has equitable access to them.
Data from the Strada Education Foundation’s 2025 State Opportunity Index illustrates this disparity, showing that only 43 percent of seniors at four-year institutions reported having at least one paid work-based learning experience. Access is rarely universal; it frequently depends heavily on available time, geographic location, financial flexibility, personal confidence, prior experience, and underlying social capital.
Furthermore, the overall supply of conventional opportunities does not even remotely approach student demand. The Business–Higher Education Forum estimates that roughly 8.2 million students actively sought internships or similar professional experiences in 2023, but approximately 4.6 million students could not access the opportunities they desired, according to the forum’s 2026 analysis titled "Lost in Translation: Navigating the Work-Integrated Learning Landscape."
But even if every student could secure an internship, an excellent internship remains just a single experience. Students fundamentally need repeated opportunities to test their developing interests, encounter radically different forms of work, apply academic knowledge in new settings, and make progressively better-informed choices about their futures.
The overarching goal should be to place traditional internships within a much richer, more comprehensive continuum of career-connected learning. That expansive continuum could easily include academic research, immersive simulations, client-driven projects, campus employment, entrepreneurial ventures, industry-sponsored challenges, community-based work, active student organizations, online learning modules, open-source software projects, robust portfolio development, and interdisciplinary competitions.
Many of these valuable opportunities already exist in abundance across our higher education institutions. Yet, students frequently experience them as isolated, disconnected activities rather than integrated parts of a cohesive developmental journey.
From Visibility to Agency
Early on in their college careers, faculty can play a vital role in helping undergraduates see how disciplinary knowledge is actively applied in professional settings. Professors might demonstrate how a theoretical concept informs an ongoing public debate, professional practice, research question, organizational decision, creative work, or complex community challenge. Alumni and practicing professionals can also help make unseen career opportunities visible, showing students how disciplinary thinking applies in unfamiliar, real-world sectors.
As students progress through their undergraduate years, they should be granted increasingly greater agency to explore possibilities by deeply investigating a field, interviewing working professionals, comparing different organizational approaches, identifying a worthy problem to solve, or determining how a particular capability is utilized across varied sectors.
Through this iterative process, students can encounter a broader array of career possibilities, rigorously test their assumptions, and make more informed choices—including the vital choice to change their academic or professional direction when warranted.
Over time, both the inherent ambiguity and the stakes of the work should increase. Advanced students should regularly encounter complex problems that do not feature obvious or predetermined answers. They should be tasked with deciding which information matters, determining what sources can be trusted, weighing competing priorities, choosing among imperfect alternatives, and accepting full responsibility for the real-world consequences of their decisions.
Agency only becomes truly meaningful when students have the literal room to make consequential choices—and when the work itself is difficult enough to reveal the limits of what they currently know. Students should also actively help shape this developmental journey by identifying which opportunities feel genuinely accessible, where institutional connections remain invisible, and which bureaucratic processes create unnecessary barriers.
From Choice to Reflective Defense
Greater agency naturally demands greater reflection. After completing authentic, real-world work, students should be given the opportunity to thoroughly explain what they decided, why they made those decisions, what empirical evidence informed their reasoning, which trade-offs they carefully considered, and how they responded when their original approach inevitably did not work out as planned.
They should also be routinely asked a probing question: Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
I like to think of this structured process as a reflective defense. The ultimate purpose is not to prove that every single choice made along the way was entirely correct. Rather, it is to demonstrate a student’s growing capacity to learn from evidence, constructive feedback, and lived experience—to clearly explain one’s reasoning, acknowledge lingering uncertainty, and revise one’s thinking when circumstances demand it.
This reflective defense could take many distinct forms across a campus: an oral examination, a comprehensive portfolio review, a written reflection, a public presentation, a recorded explanation, or an in-depth conversation with faculty members, peers, and industry practitioners. Whatever form it takes, it should be designed accessibly and assessed through transparent criteria that heavily emphasize reasoning, evidence, reflection, and personal growth, rather than superficial confidence, polish, or strict conformity to a single communication style.
In the modern workplace, finding the right answer is rarely enough on its own. Professionals must be able to articulate how they framed a complex problem, why they chose a specific approach, what lessons they learned along the way, and how they plan to adapt as circumstances inevitably change.
Experience, evidence, and expression continually reinforce one another.
This vital connection is especially critical in a labor market that increasingly emphasizes durable skills. As Colleen Flaherty recently reported in Inside Higher Ed, Dan Silverburg of Propel K20 argues that broad claims about critical thinking, communication, and adaptability only become truly meaningful to prospective employers when they are paired with concrete evidence that students have successfully applied those capabilities to real-world work.
The reflective defense adds another crucial layer by asking students to express what they learned, how they contributed to an organization, and how their professional judgment is actively developing. The initial experience gives students something consequential to do, their resulting work provides tangible evidence of their capabilities, and their guided reflection helps them determine what path should logically come next.
Advice for the Journey Ahead
As I think about my nephews beginning their own undergraduate journeys at Michigan, this developmental progression suggests some more personal, grounded advice for them and their peers.
Do not sit back and wait for someone to officially declare you career-ready. Actively seek out experiences that let you see firsthand how academic knowledge operates out in the world. Try new things before you are entirely certain they are the right fit for you. Pay close attention to what energizes you and what drains you. Actively ask for constructive feedback from mentors. Save concrete evidence of everything you have accomplished. Build genuine relationships with people whose work you want to understand and emulate.
Most importantly, learn to clearly explain the choices you make—and learn to reconsider them without ever treating a necessary change of direction as a personal failure. The world will inevitably change a great deal during your four years in college, and you will change right along with it. The ultimate objective is not to predict that complex world perfectly or to lock in your entire future career path right now. The goal is to become increasingly capable of determining what wise step to take next.
That is what I sincerely hope for my nephews. And it is also what every undergraduate student should be able to expect from a modern university designed specifically for the future.
Note: AI helped me find relevant research, pressure-test the argument, and improve the writing. The ideas, judgments, and conclusions are entirely mine—as are any overly long sentences that unfortunately survived the editing process.
James DeVaney is associate vice provost for academic innovation and the founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan.
