Despiting holding its place as the number one public university in the country, Berkeley ill-equips its students for entering the workforce. In the class of 2023, 25% of graduates are still looking for jobs, which is a staggering amount in comparison to other equivalent campuses such as UCLA, where the same number is 7%. Similarly, 20% of Berkeley's graduates pursue advanced studies in graduate, law, medical schools but are compelled to independently prepare for the entrance exams, often incurring significant personal expenses on preparatory courses.
Our career readiness programs must improve. ASUC has taken strides to address this need, like purchasing LinkedIn premium memberships for 6% of overall students, but this is simply not enough. This solution cost $158,000 for just 2000 memberships and only for 6 months, which if implemented for an entire calendar year for all of the undergraduate classes, would cost an unreasonable $7.1 million.
Berkeley’s Career Engagement Center (CEC) offers extensive counseling, advising, training, and more to undergraduates. However, as demonstrated by aforementioned statistics, it is likely that the resources provided by the CEC are being underused, and Berkeley students still need further support. We propose the following improvements to our Career preparation programs:
The largest difference found with UCLA’s and other universities’ career preparation programs and ours is our Alumni networking program. Whereas UCLA has an extensive alumni website, showing all alumni with the availability to advise on job seeking, hire students, or offer advice at any point in students career path; We have no equivalent.
Our alumni portal is clunky and does not show any indication of which alumni may be willing to help students obtain positions at their company, or even the ones who are willing to talk to current students. The user interface is quite outdated and inefficient, giving current students very limited information on any alumni. We propose that the ASUC invests substantial funding in rebuilding our Alumni portal to be similar to that of UCLA’s, which would greatly benefit those looking to network within the Berkeley community. Additionally, Handshake is rife with scam job postings, and an internal, alumni based job board would mitigate such issues.
For those who have already graduated, the CEC offers continued advising for 2 years through Handshake. When you browse these advising appointments though, you will find that they are only for specific majors, completely ignoring the majority of L&S, Arts, and Humanities majors. We propose that the ASUC encourages the CEC to expand their post-graduation advising to include these currently unserved majors.
Although the CEC offers great opportunities and support for those in underserved communities, more students in these communities must be made aware of the existence of such programs. We propose that the ASUC forms a committee on student career outreach to address this problem. We propose two immediate action items:
The CEC partners with campus affinity groups of these underrepresented groups and hosts open workshops to broadcast the work the CEC offers for students in such groups.
The ASUC invests in campus advertising for the CEC, specifically targeting these underrepresented communities.
Although Berkeley boasts impressive matriculation and acceptance rates for students continuing onto medical and law school, the preparation courses for the required standardized testing is often extremely expensive, costing students up to $4000. We propose that the ASUC allocates a substantial amount of funding to subsidizing the preparation materials for students. Though this is a costly endeavor, we believe that this is a much more effective cause to spend $158,000, compared to purchasing LinkedIn premium memberships for a fractional amount of students.
As job markets get more difficult to navigate, the skills needed to obtain jobs change. We propose the creation of a task force that annually reviews new job skill trends, collaborates with the CEC, and hosts workshops for students on obtaining these new skills. Equipping our students with the most current skills will allow our students to survive.
In its admissions materials, UC Berkeley boasts its loci within the Bay Area as a major selling point for prospective applicants. Along with Stanford University, UC Berkeley is the top university in the region. Nevertheless, students are not given resources or opportunities to reach major engineering, tech, and biotech networks. While campus offers job fairs and internship workshops, there are few positions available and primarily depend upon an excess of individual effort. Even using the current private internship system through Berkeley Discovery’s Student Opportunity Center, internships are not designated for campus students specifically. We propose working with major companies such as Genentech, Microsoft, Nvidia, and others to build positions for Berkeley student interns within the companies. This solution is not unique, in the Bay Area, Stanford University places students at top companies. Extrapolating to public universities, many colleges across the United States offer co-op programs and linked companies that offer internships to partner universities.