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Stories
Sound Bites: A Degree of Hope
Stephen Moret (MBA 2001)
President and CEO, the Strada Education Foundation
Illustration by John S. Dykes
I grew up as the son of a single mother in rural Mississippi. And while we were never legally poor, there was that sense of economic insecurity the whole way. And so higher education to me really represented this promise of economic mobility.
It’s important for any student who’s planning to go directly into the labor market after they finish their undergraduate degree to start the career exploration process as early as possible in their college experience.
Every college should be encouraging students to have at least one, if not multiple, paid internships before they complete college. It’s a much lower-stakes decision to take a six- or eight-week job than it is to move across the country for a full-time position after you graduate.
Most states, for example, can tell you what a typical earnings outcome would be [after college]. But the majority of states can’t tell you what kind of jobs people get. That’s critical, to have any sense of supply-demand gaps that are not being met in the labor market.
This is not about saying that higher education needs to just be about jobs. ...It’s saying that this is a big part of what most people want to get out of the college experience, so let’s do a better job of helping them to have good outcomes—and, by the way, that’ll help a lot of employers as well.
While higher education has multiple purposes, Moret says Strada wants to make sure its promise of economic mobility delivers more consistently— especially for those who have faced historical challenges. “Our whole focus is helping ensure that those who pursue and complete some form of post-secondary education are able to have good outcomes after they finish,” he says.
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