When I went to college, I had no idea what my major would be. I tried literature, anthropology and business before landing on Latin American studies. If you had asked me back then what I would do with that major, I would have shrugged. “The job will come,” I would have said. I was lucky. For me, the jobs did come, but today’s students do not have the luxury of waiting it out with a shrug.
Our students may be 18 or 42. They may work full-time or care for family while they study. They want to know how much of their limited time a degree will require and what it will be worth when they finish. These are reasonable questions, yet too often higher education has not provided clear answers.
The problem is rarely that coursework lacks real-world value, it is that we expect students to make the connections themselves. We expect them to recognize that a statistics course builds data analysis skills and that a seminar paper is practice in evidence-based argumentation. Students from households with professional networks may get help making these connections around the dinner table, but many of our students do not. Many CUNY students come from households earning less than $30,000 annually and have limited exposure to high-wage, high-growth industries. For them, the gap between what they learn and how they can apply it professionally is also an equity gap.
The City University of New York (CUNY) is working to close that gap. CUNY Beyond, an initiative launched in 2025, embeds career readiness throughout the undergraduate experience, making the connection between academic learning and professional opportunities intentional rather than incidental. Its work is organized around five pillars: career exposure and exploration, integrated academic and career advising, career-connected learning, paid work-based learning and employer engagement.
Lehman College was one of four campuses in the first wave of implementation, and the first year was a learning experience for our community and employer partners. This fall, with a $6.8 million investment through New York State’s Career Connect initiative, CUNY Beyond expanded to nine campuses with the goal of extending the initiative across all undergraduate colleges by 2030. Several lessons from our implementation offer a roadmap for other institutions.
Put Career-Infused Degree Maps in Students’ Hands on Day One
CUNY has developed hundreds of career-infused degree maps with faculty, advisors, alumni and employers, including organizations such as Morgan Stanley, Google and Pfizer. These maps pair semester-by-semester academic requirements with career milestones, from creating a professional profile to preparing for employment.
At Lehman, mapping is a focus for our second year. Our goal is to have 75% of our academic programs mapped by the end of this year and to reach 100% by the end of our third. These maps show students how their courses, skills and experiences fit together into a pathway toward professional opportunity. It makes the value of a degree visible before a student asks what comes next.
Train the Advisors that Students Already See to Have Career Conversations
Career centers do vital work, but they often depend on students choosing to walk through their doors. We know that only about 25% of our students connect with career professionals, while virtually every student interacts with an academic advisor at least once each semester. CUNY Beyond bridges this divide by integrating academic and career advising. Students should learn not only which courses they need to graduate but how those courses connect to their career interests.
Our Career Exploration and Development Center works with academic advisors to build career conversations into routine advising, which means helping students consider career options related to their majors, identifying the skills they are developing and understanding the experiences or credentials that would strengthen their prospects.
This approach is particularly important for adult learners, who often bring substantial professional and life experience, but need help connecting that experience to a new credential, a career transition, or opportunities for advancement.
Put Careers Inside the Course, Not Beside It
Connecting learning to work is academic work, not an extracurricular activity. At Lehman, five CUNY Beyond Faculty Fellows representing Arts and Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences, and Business are incorporating career-connected learning into their courses and helping colleagues do the same.
This is not about reducing the purpose of higher education to workforce preparation. It is about making explicit the competencies that academic coursework already develops. A history student who spends a semester evaluating contradictory primary sources has practiced the critical analysis and evidence-based reasoning that employers value. A business student who works through a case study learns to assess complex problems and make recommendations. These students should leave their courses able to articulate those skills in an interview—on a resume or on the job.
Faculty play an essential role in this process. By identifying career-related competencies in syllabi, designing assignments that mirror real-world challenges and creating opportunities for students to reflect on what they have learned, faculty can help students recognize the professional relevance of their academic experiences without compromising intellectual rigor.
Measure Outcomes, Not Just Activity
Early CUNY Beyond results are encouraging. In the first year, internship applications increased by 76% at Lehman. But applications are not placements, and placements are not careers. Ultimately, we must measure whether these efforts translate into meaningful employment, professional advancement and economic mobility. CUNY Beyond’s goals include tripling the number of students that secure paid internship while enrolled and 80% of graduates consistently employed in their career of choice within a year of graduation.
These goals are ambitious but necessary, and reaching them will require strengthening relationships with employers and creating more paid internships. Paid work-based learning matters most for students who cannot sacrifice income for unpaid experience. If we want all students to benefit from experiential learning, access cannot depend on a student’s ability to work for free.
Make the Connection Visible and the Opportunity Accessible
Implementing CUNY Beyond at Lehman made obvious that connecting coursework to careers cannot be the responsibility of any single office. It requires an institutional commitment that brings together academic departments, advising, career services, student affairs, leadership, alumni and employers. It also means recognizing that a traditional-age student exploring a first career and an adult learner seeking to advance or change careers may follow different paths, but both deserve a clear picture of how their education can get them there.
Higher education should never promise that a major guarantees a particular job or an immediate economic return. A college education should cultivate curiosity, intellectual independence, civic engagement and the capacity to question, create and contribute. Preserving these fundamental values also means answering students’ very real questions about their futures.
Our responsibility is to make the value of education visible, not to assume that students will discover it on their own. When we help them see the connections between what they learn, the credentials they earn, the skills they develop and the opportunities available to them, we do not diminish the purpose of higher education. We fulfill it more completely, giving students the knowledge, experiences, confidence and ability to navigate the world beyond the classroom and to shape the future they envision for themselves.