Episode 94: Ben Wildavsky on What Skills and Relationships Lead to Career Success
How can broad education + targeted skills + social capital lead to success in college and beyond? How can students combine getting an education and getting a job, especially in the age of AI? How can students play the short game (i.e., targeted skills) and the long game (i.e., broad education) as they think about the careers they want to have and the lives they want to lead? We discuss these questions and more with Ben Wildavsky, Author of The Career Arts.
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In an era defined by rapid technological shifts and the rise of artificial intelligence, a fundamental question is keeping students and educators up at night: Is college still worth it? As public confidence in higher education fluctuates, many are tempted to view a degree and a job as an "either-or" proposition.
According to Ben Wildavsky, author of The Career Arts, the secret to long-term professional success isn't choosing between a practical trade and a traditional education—it’s embracing both. By blending broad intellectual curiosity with specific, marketable skills and a robust professional network, students can build a "career insurance policy" that lasts a lifetime.
Redefining Student Success in the Age of AI
For decades, we have focused heavily on where to go to college, but we haven't spent nearly enough time discussing how to go to college. Wildavsky argues that student success should be viewed through the lens of building human capital. It isn't just about passing exams; it’s about developing "habits of mind"—the ability to think, analyze, and communicate.
In the age of AI, the "short game" (getting your first job) and the "long game" (navigating a 40-year career) are equally important. While a coding bootcamp might offer a quick entry point into the workforce, those specific technical skills have a short half-life. A broad education provides the flexibility to adapt when the underlying technology changes.
The Balanced Diet: Three Pillars of Professional Longevity
Wildavsky describes the ideal educational experience as a "balanced diet" consisting of three essential ingredients:
Broad Education: These are the durable skills—critical thinking, communication, and the ability to work with others. These transversal skills are what allow a professional to pivot from their fourth job to their fifth and sixth.
Targeted Skills: Employers still need to know you can do the job on day one. Whether it’s accounting, nursing, or a Salesforce certification, targeted skills act as a differentiator in a crowded job market.
Social Capital: This is often the missing link. Knowing things is necessary, but knowing people who can vouch for you and provide "insider" information is what puts those skills into action.
Cultivating Social Capital as a Teachable Skill
One of the most significant barriers to higher education ROI is the "hidden curriculum" of networking. Many students, particularly first-generation or low-income students, believe that career opportunities are purely accidents of birth or family connections.
Wildavsky highlights organizations that treat social capital in careers as a teachable skill. By training students in the art of the "informational interview"—reaching out to alumni not for a job, but for twenty minutes of their time—colleges can level the playing field. When a student meets a professional in their field, their coursework "comes alive" because they can finally see the real-world application of their studies.
Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Careers
A common tension on campus exists between faculty, who fear "vocationalism," and students, who crave career guidance. The solution is not to turn professors into job coaches, but to integrate career preparation into the academic mission.
Some innovative institutions are moving their career offices under the Provost’s wing, signaling that career readiness is part of the intellectual journey. An English professor doesn't need to teach marketing; they simply need to help students understand how the ability to analyze complex texts is a superpower in industries ranging from law to advertising.
Adapting to the New Landscape: Advice for Leaders
While public skepticism regarding the value of college is at an all-time high, the economic evidence remains clear: college graduates earn significantly more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma. However, to maintain this value, institutions must improve their student success strategies, particularly regarding completion rates for Pell-eligible and minority students.
The "both-and" approach is the way forward. Colleges should embrace stackable credentials and short-term certificates—not as replacements for a degree, but as complements to it. By providing a supportive environment that treats students as human beings with complicated lives, higher education can prove its worth as the ultimate engine for upward mobility.
Episode 94 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: That was Ben Wildavsky, the author of the great book, the Career Arts, and we had a great conversation about how broad education plus targeted skills plus social capital equals success in college and life beyond. We talked about how it's not either or getting an education versus getting a job. It's both, and especially in the age of AI where students need to play the short game and the long game as they think about the careers they want to have and the lives they wanna lead. So much of this conversation resonated with me because it aligns with my perspective that we spend way too much time thinking about where to go to college and not nearly enough about how to go to college.
Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers.
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Elliot Felix: I would love to hear how you define student success from all this great research and reporting you've done.
Ben Wildavsky: When it comes to student success, I've gotten very interested in the way that economists think about education and the idea of building human capital. The kinds of skills that we learn to do things, ways that we learned to think—a fancy way of saying it is habits of mind—which I think are really fundamental to a high quality education. So when I think about student success, and partly for my book research, I became much more interested in the question of how education connects to careers and jobs.
Ben Wildavsky: I define those in the career arts as a mixture of very broad education—critical thinking, ability to communicate, ability to work with others—combined with targeted skills, which could be everything from nursing to teaching to accounting. And then the third is the idea of social capital, which is building networks and human relationships. It's a combination of the things that they know and the people that they've met and how they're able to combine those to put them into action in a particular career.
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Elliot Felix: Social capital to me is almost like the multiplier of the broad education and the targeted skills you're talking about, and it really unlocks so much of the potential.
Ben Wildavsky: Social capital of the three things that I talk about, that's the one that I think colleges have been slowest to embrace. I think the key shift is to think about social capital as a skill that can be taught. There are organizations like Braven that work with first generation low-income students on helping create programs while they're still in college that help teach them techniques that will help them get a really good first job out of college.
Ben Wildavsky: I met a guy who immigrated to the states as a teenager from Macedonia. He felt like the way you had to get a job was your family had to know someone. He was blown away when he took a class with Braven and they taught him about informational interviews—that you could approach somebody who'd gone to your school and say, "Hey, I'm interested in your field, would you have 20 minutes to talk to me?" Surprisingly often, that kind of thing will work.
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Elliot Felix: What trends are changing the landscape, especially with things like coding bootcamps versus degrees?
Ben Wildavsky: People tend to think we need many more shorter, cheaper, targeted programs. People still talk about things like coding bootcamps as if somehow that's a better alternative to college. But of course, one of the paradoxes of the rise of AI is that coding bootcamps are one of the first things to be made obsolete because AI can do so much of the basic coding.
Ben Wildavsky: We need to have a reset where our "both-and" applies in a big picture way too. These skills have what's sometimes called a very short half-life. You feel like you're up to date with the latest thing, but all of a sudden it's obsolete. So you need to know how to learn. How can you develop the kind of good judgment that is going to help you give better guidance or better prompts to AI, and how to tell when it's hallucinating something? That's all part of your own personal development.
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Elliot Felix: What's your advice for college and universities to adapt to these changes and help students succeed?
Ben Wildavsky: There is a very robust evidence base that really shows the economic value of college. It's not even a close call. College graduates on average are earning about 75% more than people who only have high school diplomas. Colleges should feel confident in what they're doing, but they should do a better job of getting students to completion.
Ben Wildavsky: Whether it's community colleges, open access, or regional publics, those are places that just need to do a better job taking care of students. Helping give them guidance, treating them as human beings, acknowledging the complicated lives that they live, and trying to provide the kinds of services that are gonna be supportive to them. Also making the case to the students that a practical degree is great, but don't forget the long game. You want to make sure you have those skills that are gonna help you navigate a long career. It really is a proven package.