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By Austin Sarat and Leah Schmalzbauer
A survey of employers released on Jan. 13 brought bad news for college students entering the workforce in 2026. Among its worrisome results, “Small businesses are 30 percent more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year.”
As professor Murugan Anandarajan and his colleagues, who conducted the survey, explained, “This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade.” But this is not just a small business problem.
Employers in big businesses are also prioritizing “stability and operational efficiency over broad hiring expansion.” Indeed, the post-college economic landscape is daunting, and college students are feeling the stress.
This reality is likely to exacerbate careerism on college campuses like ours, Amherst College, a small, liberal arts college committed to fostering intellectual growth, taking risks in academic work, and learning for its own sake. As Isabella Glassman, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, described it as “pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that … is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices; it also permeates daily life.”
Two months after Glassman, Princeton’s Lily Halbert Alexander wrote that what she called “an excessively ‘careerist’ approach to education has consequences. While the learning we do in the present should ideally prepare us for our futures, focusing on the future at the expense of what captivates and inspires us in the present limits our intellectual horizons.”
Limiting intellectual horizons means students are less willing to take risks or to tolerate the kind of open inquiry that is essential in a community committed to the full exercise of academic freedom. To realize that goal requires thinking about ways to enlist careerism to stoke students’ desires to think freely, creatively, and in ways that may make them uncomfortable.
Doing so will not only support academic freedom, but it will ultimately make for more effective and fulfilled workers. Yet rarely do faculty and those in career services collaborate in pursuit of what we see as interrelated goals — intellectually curious and astute students who are employable. In the absence of this collaboration, careerism is claiming center stage.
We know, for example, that “College students overwhelmingly rank career preparation — specifically obtaining a degree for better job opportunities, higher earning potential, and gaining practical experience through internships — as the most important aspect of their education.”
Those findings are not just a problem for students. Many faculty members believe careerism is a plague. They want to curb it.
They see themselves as battling with the pervasive pre-professionalism that Glassman and Hilbert-Alexander describe. That battle entails a perpetual push and pull with anxious students, many of whom fear that if they don’t prioritize career prep they will be left behind or worse. That is a battle faculty can’t win.
As teachers who regard the classroom with a kind of reverence — and hope our students will do the same — we need to develop strategies to turn careerism to the service of academic commitment and the exercise of academic freedom while acknowledging the challenging economic context our students are confronting. Doing so will require more than merely reiterating the value of a liberal education in an ever-changing world.
It will require us to be clear about how academic rigor, demanding faculty, and the freest exercise of academic freedom are critical to career success. And it will require enlisting the career services offices on our campuses as our allies.
Neither will be an easy task. Both are, however, essential.
First, colleges and universities need to acknowledge the problem. A year ago, Harvard University did just that. It released a report that said, “Many Harvard College students do not prioritize their courses and some view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful, and useful allocation of their time; most faculty view student curricular disengagement with alarm.”
Harvard, it went on, “seeks to provide a transformative educational experience, but instructors’ and students’ expectations about the centrality of the classroom are unaligned.” Who hasn’t heard similar complaints on their campus?
But beyond those observations, the Harvard report didn’t offer many concrete steps that faculty could take to help teachers and the university address careerism. In fact, it did not even mention its own Mignone Center for Career Success.
On its website, the Mignone Center identifies 13 ways to build “career skills.” None of them references the benefits students derive from their academic work.
That omission is not unique to Harvard. Here and elsewhere, the message students get is: Do Internships. Build Networks.
This is, at least in part, good advice. Networks and internships do help students get a foot in the door. This is especially important for first generation college students who are less likely than their class-privileged peers to have access to professional networks or to have entered college with internship experience. In this sense, career centers on campuses like ours, which prioritize leveling the playing field for all students, are addressing an important inequity.
But internships and network-building alone are not sufficient. Getting a foot in the door doesn’t ensure job success or a meaningful professional life. If colleges are to address the problems highlighted in the Harvard report, they will need their career services offices to deliver and reinforce the kind of message that students-athletes get from their coaches: Academics first.
They will need to emphasize the value of academic freedom for both students and faculty.
Those offices need to make it clear to students that the key to career readiness is developing good academic habits and engaging with faculty who will be demanding, give honest feedback, and set high expectations. They need to tell students that where the academic challenge is greatest, the career payoff will be the greatest.
Employers seem to want exactly that.
However, the work needed to enlist careerism as a resource to motivate students to commit to their academic work is not just the responsibility of career services offices. It is our work as well.
We don’t do students any favors when we fail to give them honest criticism, the kind that performing artists or student athletes get from directors or coaches every day. Grade inflation erodes career readiness.
We can do so by returning rigor to a place of honor in higher education. Rigor, as professors Jamiella Brooks and Julie McGurk explain “ is not simply hard for the sake of being hard … it is purposeful and transparent …. In courses with rigor, defined as a higher-order understanding of concepts and skills, students reported that they are more likely to employ critical thinking, appreciate the skills and ideas of the discipline, and enjoy the challenge of the class.”
We need to do our part to help students appreciate the value of open inquiry, even when it seems to have no obvious connection to career preparation. It is on those of us who teach to show how our classes “encourage… critical thinking and problem solving” and how they are best cultivated where a wide range of views are welcomed.
Academic freedom can only flourish if faculty and career services offices emphasize their value in preparing students for the world that awaits them. If both do their part, we can co-opt careerism and use it to motivate the kind of academic commitment that fuels a great education.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
Leah Schmalzbauer is Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in the Social Sciences, Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty, Amherst College
For more about our original academic freedom collection—including additional work from Professor Sarat—visit here. Here is our latest on the subject:
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Does Careerism Threaten Academic Commitment and Academic Freedom?
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Academic Freedom: Trump’s University Blackmail Results
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Freedom Under Siege: Trump’s War on Speech, Schools, and Truth
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2025 Rekindled Commitments to Academic Freedom Nationwide
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There’s an Intensifying Kind of Threat to Academic Freedom – Watchful Students Serving As Informants
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