This fall, two nephews of James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, began their first year as undergraduates at the university. Ahead of their enrollment, DeVaney engaged in extensive conversations with them as they weighed their college options. Ultimately, they chose Michigan—the very institution where DeVaney began his own higher education journey many years ago.
As these new students embark on their academic pursuits, DeVaney notes a striking evolution in higher education. The landscape they navigate offers vastly more pathways to explore personal interests, network with prospective employers, cultivate vital capabilities, and directly bridge theoretical learning with practical work experience. Yet, this abundance of choice comes with a distinct complexity. They are stepping into a dynamic labor market that will undergo radical transformations between their first day of class and the moment they cross the graduation stage.
Reflecting on what he hopes they will experience over the next four years brings to light a fundamental obligation that universities hold toward every student. Institutions must offer more than just a proliferation of isolated opportunities; they must deliver a cohesive developmental journey. This educational trajectory should empower students to make progressively sophisticated decisions while learning constructively from both their successes and missteps.
In a prior commentary exploring the future of learning innovation, DeVaney argued that career readiness cannot simply wait until graduation day. Educators, industry leaders, and university administrators responded to that thesis with diverse examples of how they are already successfully connecting coursework with professional practice. Those insights underscored a pivotal takeaway: an early, authentic encounter with a real-world problem does far more than just prepare a student for an eventual job. It fundamentally transforms how that student approaches every subsequent academic experience.
When a student witnesses theoretical, disciplinary knowledge applied directly within a real-world context, they return to the campus classroom with an entirely different set of questions. Abstract concepts instantly acquire tangible context. The inevitable struggles of rigorous academic work gain a clear, motivating purpose. Students begin to grasp where their studies might ultimately lead them and how they can meaningfully contribute to society.
This dynamic points toward an institutional goal far more ambitious than merely ensuring every graduating senior secures a traditional internship. The critical question facing higher education is what would happen if undergraduates encountered dozens of progressively challenging opportunities to connect their classroom learning with actual work throughout the entirety of their undergraduate education.
Career readiness should never be structured as a disjointed assortment of programs clumsily clustered around the finish line of graduation. Instead, it must be deeply developmental. Students should be encouraged to actively explore diverse possibilities, exercise increasing personal agency, tackle authentic challenges, and learn the art of explaining and reconsidering their choices along the way.
One Internship Can’t Do It All
Internships are undeniably valuable. They provide students with meaningful professional exposure, crucial industry relationships, heightened self-confidence, and a clearer vision of their future career trajectories. However, access to these traditional positions remains far from universal.
Data from the Strada Education Foundation’s 2025 State Opportunity Index illustrates this disparity, revealing that only 43 percent of seniors at four-year academic institutions report participating in at least one paid, work-based learning experience. Access is frequently dictated by restrictive variables such as available time, geographic location, financial flexibility, pre-existing confidence, prior work history, and established social capital.
Furthermore, the overall market supply of conventional opportunities falls drastically short of student demand. According to a 2026 analysis titled "Lost in Translation: Navigating the Work-Integrated Learning Landscape" published by the Business-Higher Education Forum, approximately 8.2 million students actively sought internships or comparable professional experiences in 2023. Yet, roughly 4.6 million of those students were unable to secure the opportunities they desired.
Even when students land exceptional internships, a single experience is never enough. Undergraduates require repeated, ongoing opportunities to test their shifting interests, encounter varied forms of professional work, apply academic knowledge in novel settings, and make progressively better-informed choices about their futures.
The overarching objective for universities should be to embed internships within a much broader, richer continuum of career-connected learning. This expansive continuum can encompass academic research, professional simulations, client-driven projects, campus employment, entrepreneurial ventures, industry-sponsored challenges, community-based service learning, student organization leadership, online learning modules, open-source development, professional portfolio creation, and interdisciplinary competitions.
Many of these valuable opportunities already exist in abundance across college campuses. Regrettably, students frequently experience them as isolated, disconnected activities rather than as integrated components of a comprehensive professional and personal development plan.
From Visibility to Agency
In the earliest stages of an undergraduate program, faculty members play a crucial role in helping students visualize how academic disciplines are actively applied in professional environments. Instructors can demonstrate how a theoretical concept informs an ongoing public debate, standard professional practice, complex research inquiry, organizational decision-making process, creative endeavor, or pressing community challenge. Alumni and active practitioners can similarly demystify unseen career pathways, illustrating how specialized thinking translates into unfamiliar sectors.
As students advance through their coursework, they should be granted increasing agency to explore possibilities independently. This involves investigating specialized fields, interviewing industry professionals, comparing different organizational strategies, identifying a worthwhile problem to solve, or determining how a specific capability is utilized across diverse industries.
Through this process, students encounter a wider array of career possibilities, rigorously test their initial assumptions, and make more deliberate choices—including the vital choice to change their academic or professional direction when appropriate.
Over time, the level of ambiguity and the stakes involved should naturally increase. Advanced undergraduates must be confronted with complex problems that lack straightforward, obvious answers. They should be tasked with determining what information is actually relevant, deciding what sources can be trusted, weighing competing organizational priorities, choosing among imperfect alternatives, and accepting full responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.
True student agency only becomes meaningful when learners are given the genuine freedom to make consequential choices—and when the assigned work is difficult enough to expose the boundaries of their current knowledge. Students should also actively help shape this developmental journey by highlighting which opportunities feel genuinely accessible, identifying where institutional connections remain invisible, and pointing out administrative processes that create unnecessary barriers.
From Choice to Reflective Defense
Greater personal agency inherently demands deeper reflection. Following the completion of authentic professional work, students should be provided with structured opportunities to articulate their decisions: what they chose to do, the rationale behind their choices, the specific evidence that informed their reasoning, the trade-offs they carefully weighed, and how they adapted when their initial strategies failed.
They should also be routinely prompted to answer a critical forward-looking question: Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
This practice functions as a reflective defense. Its primary purpose is not to prove that every past choice was flawless, but rather to demonstrate a student’s capacity to learn from objective evidence, constructive feedback, and lived experience. It teaches them how to clearly explain their reasoning, gracefully acknowledge uncertainty, and revise their thinking in real time.
Such a defense can take many distinct forms, including an oral examination, a professional portfolio review, a written reflective essay, a public presentation, a recorded explanation, or a targeted conversation with faculty members, peers, and industry practitioners. These assessments must be designed for accessibility and evaluated through transparent criteria that emphasize critical reasoning, empirical evidence, deep reflection, and personal growth—rather than superficial confidence, polished presentation, or strict conformity to a single communication style.
In the modern workplace, arriving at the right answer is rarely sufficient on its own. Professionals must be able to articulate how they framed a complex problem, why they selected their particular approach, what lessons they extracted from the process, and how they plan to adapt as circumstances inevitably shift.
Experience, evidence, and effective expression continuously reinforce one another throughout a career.
This interconnected approach holds particular significance in a labor market that places a premium on durable, transferable skills. As recent reporting in Inside Higher Ed highlights, experts such as Dan Silverburg of Propel K20 argue that broad claims regarding critical thinking, communication, and adaptability only become truly meaningful to prospective employers when paired with tangible evidence that students have successfully applied those capabilities to real-world tasks.
The reflective defense adds a crucial layer of depth by requiring students to articulate what they learned, how they contributed, and how their professional judgment is actively maturing. Practical experience gives students something consequential to do, their resulting work provides verifiable evidence of their capabilities, and structured reflection helps them determine their next steps.
Advice for the Journey Ahead
Reflecting on his nephews as they begin their undergraduate careers, DeVaney notes that this developmental progression offers personal, actionable guidance for any incoming student.
Students should avoid waiting for an institution or an employer to formally declare them career-ready. Instead, they should actively seek out experiences that reveal how academic knowledge operates in the broader world. They must be willing to try new paths before they are entirely certain those paths are right for them, paying close attention to what energizes them and what does not. Seeking out constructive feedback, meticulously saving evidence of past work, and building genuine relationships with professionals whose careers they wish to understand are essential steps.
Most importantly, students must learn to clearly explain the choices they make—and retain the flexibility to reconsider those choices without viewing a change of direction as a failure. The world will inevitably transform during a student’s time in college, and the students themselves will change as well. The ultimate objective is not to predict the future with absolute perfection or lock in an entire career path on day one, but rather to become steadily more capable of determining the right next step.
That remains the ultimate hope for incoming students everywhere, and it stands as the baseline expectation every student should demand from a university thoughtfully designed for the future.
