This fall, two of my nephews began their first year at the University of Michigan. I spoke with them at length as they contemplated where to attend, and ultimately they chose Michigan—the same place where, many years ago, I began my own undergraduate journey.
As they embark on their own learning journeys, I am struck by how different their experiences will be from mine. They will have more ways to explore their interests, encounter employers, build capabilities and connect learning with work. They will also face a more complex set of choices—and a world of work that will change dramatically between their first day and graduation.
As I consider what I hope they will experience over the next four years, I also think about what universities owe them and every student: not simply more opportunities, but a developmental journey that enables students to make increasingly informed decisions and learn from their choices.
In the first column in this series, I argued that career readiness cannot wait until graduation. Educators, employers and university leaders responded with examples of how they are already connecting learning and work. Their responses reinforced a central point worthy of further reflection: An early encounter with an authentic problem does more than prepare a student for a future job. It can transform how that student experiences everything that follows.
A student who has seen disciplinary knowledge applied in the world returns to the classroom with different questions. Concepts acquire context. Productive struggle gains purpose. The student begins to understand where their learning might lead and how they might contribute.
That suggests a more ambitious goal than ensuring every student secures an internship. What if students encountered dozens of progressively challenging opportunities to connect learning and work throughout their undergraduate education?
Career readiness should not be an assortment of disconnected programs clustered around graduation. It should be developmental: Students should explore possibilities, exercise increasing agency, tackle authentic problems and learn to explain and reconsider their choices.
One Internship Can’t Do It All
Internships are extraordinarily valuable. They give students meaningful experience, professional relationships, greater confidence and a clearer vision of where they want to go next. But not every student has access to one.
Strada Education Foundation’s 2025 State Opportunity Index shows that 43 percent of seniors at four-year institutions reported having at least one paid work-based learning experience. Access depends on time, geography, financial flexibility, confidence, prior experience and social capital.
The supply of conventional opportunities also does not approach student demand. The Business–Higher Education Forum estimates that 8.2 million students sought internships or similar experiences in 2023, but approximately 4.6 million could not access the opportunities they wanted, according to its 2026 analysis “Lost in Translation: Navigating the Work-Integrated Learning Landscape.”
But even excellent internships remain a single experience. Students need repeated opportunities to test their interests, encounter different forms of work, apply knowledge in new settings and make progressively better-informed choices.
The goal should be to place internships within a much richer continuum of career-connected learning. That continuum could include research, simulations, client projects, campus employment, entrepreneurial ventures, industry challenges, community-based work, student organizations, online learning, open-source projects, portfolio development and interdisciplinary competitions.
Many of these opportunities already exist across our institutions. Yet students frequently experience them as isolated activities rather than connected parts of their development.
From Visibility to Agency
Early on, faculty can help undergraduates see how disciplinary knowledge is applied in professional settings. They might demonstrate how a concept informs a public debate, professional practice, research question, organizational decision, creative work or community challenge. Alumni and practitioners can make unseen opportunities visible, showing how disciplinary thinking applies in unfamiliar settings.
As students progress, they should gain greater agency to explore possibilities by investigating a field, interviewing professionals, comparing organizational approaches, identifying a worthy problem or determining how a particular capability is used across different sectors.
Students can then encounter more career possibilities, test their assumptions and make more informed choices—including the choice to change direction.
Over time, the ambiguity and stakes should increase. Advanced students should encounter problems without obvious answers. They should decide which information matters, determine what can be trusted, weigh competing priorities, choose among imperfect alternatives and accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.
Agency becomes meaningful when students have room to make consequential choices—and when the work is difficult enough to reveal the limits of what they know. Students should also help shape this developmental journey by identifying which opportunities feel accessible, where connections remain invisible and which institutional processes create unnecessary barriers.
From Choice to Reflective Defense
Greater agency demands greater reflection. After completing authentic work, students should have an opportunity to explain what they decided, why they decided it, what evidence informed their reasoning, which trade-offs they considered and how they responded when their original approach did not work.
They should also be asked, what would you do differently, knowing what you know now?
I think of this as a reflective defense. The purpose is not to prove that every choice was correct. It is to demonstrate the capacity to learn from evidence, feedback and experience—to explain one’s reasoning, acknowledge uncertainty and revise one’s thinking.
The defense could take many forms: an oral examination, portfolio review, written reflection, public presentation, recorded explanation or conversation with faculty, peers and practitioners. It should be designed accessibly and assessed through transparent criteria that emphasize reasoning, evidence, reflection and growth—not confidence, polish or conformity to a single communication style.
At work, the right answer is rarely enough. People must explain how they framed the problem, why they chose their approach, what they learned and how they would adapt as circumstances change.
Experience, evidence and expression reinforce one another.
This connection is especially important in a labor market that increasingly emphasizes durable skills. As Colleen Flaherty recently reported in Inside Higher Ed, Dan Silverburg of Propel K20 argues that claims about critical thinking, communication and adaptability become meaningful to employers when paired with evidence that students have applied those capabilities to real work.
The reflective defense adds another layer by asking students to express what they learned, how they contributed and how their judgment is developing. The experience gives students something consequential to do. Their work provides evidence of their capabilities. Their reflection helps them determine what should come next.
Advice for the Journey Ahead
As I think about my nephews beginning their own undergraduate journeys, this developmental progression suggests some more personal advice.
Do not wait for someone to declare you career-ready. Seek out experiences that let you see how knowledge operates in the world. Try things before you are certain they are right for you. Notice what energizes you and what does not. Ask for feedback. Save the evidence of what you have done. Build relationships with people whose work you want to understand.
Most importantly, learn to explain the choices you make—and to reconsider them without treating a change of direction as failure. The world will change during your four years at Michigan, and so will you. The objective is not to predict that world perfectly or decide your entire future now. It is to become increasingly capable of determining what to do next.
That is what I hope for my nephews. It is also what every student should be able to expect from a university designed for the future.
Note: AI helped me find relevant research, pressure-test the argument and improve the writing. The ideas, judgments and conclusions are mine—as are any overly long sentences that survived the editing process.
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