Amid a pandemic crisis characterized by stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions, one university career services leader describes the crisis with an unexpected word: freedom.
“Disruption means you have a really wonderful excuse to try something different,” said Marianna Savoca, assistant vice president for career development and experiential education at Stony Brook University in New York. “That’s freedom, and for some students, that can relieve some of the stress on their shoulders.”
At Stony Brook, the pandemic also brought some unexpected freedom to the career center: freedom to accelerate virtual networking opportunities. Freedom to engage employers who seemed out of reach when internships and career fairs had to be in-person. Even freedom to at last secure access to Zoom.
Higher education institutions around the country have been forced in the past year to realign priorities, invest in technology, rethink academic courses, and reassess how campus services such as academic and career advising function in the short-term.
A new report from Deloitte and Strada presents the challenges of COVID-19 as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” and encourages leaders to lasso the “burst of innovation” that sprang from the crisis.
“We’re all trying to figure out how to do more in the same amount of time,” Jeff Selingo, a New York Times bestselling author and co-author of the report, said in a recent Strada webinar, “The Hybrid Campus: A Postpandemic Vision of Higher Education.” “And I think this idea of a hybrid education, not just inside the classroom but outside the classroom, can enable us to do that.”
Now that postpandemic days are inching closer, can we harness these changes to ensure COVID-19 wasn’t just a challenging speed bump, but an on-ramp to a better model?
