During training, the Swarthmore Admissions Department teaches every tour guide to end their tours with, or at least include at some point, a bit about why they chose to come to Swarthmore. Being the rule follower I am, I ended every one of my tours, without fail, standing in front of Parrish Hall giving my own spiel: I chose Swarthmore because of its strong financial aid, liberal arts curriculum, and awesome community (almost always in that order, too).
I could (and will) defend these points tooth and nail, as I believe in the positive way they have impacted my time at Swarthmore and my life as a whole; but that is far from the aim of this article. I instead would like to focus my thoughts on Swarthmore’s “liberal arts curriculum.”
I credit this functionally open curriculum for allowing me the space and time to figure out what I wanted to study. I’ve always been someone who loves to have a hand in everything at once, and not having to take any specific classes (outside of distribution requirements) or declare a major until sophomore year has given me the unique opportunity to study almost anything I want without much pressure. If I had not gone to Swarthmore, I would have found myself at the University of Maryland, which is indeed an excellent school; however, I would not have had the same academic flexibility I have at Swarthmore, and so I am grateful to be in my third year cheering for the Garnet.
However, this praise is not to say that I have not had my own doubts about my trajectory after college. I am a theater major with a double minor in Spanish and film & media studies; I am not receiving a degree that is traditionally successful in the job market today. I have internally reconciled this harsh reality with the knowledge that I love participating in these disciplines, but this alone has not completely absolved me of my future financial worries.
With all this in mind, I would argue that even though Swarthmore’s liberal arts model of “play around until you find something you enjoy” is great for helping students navigate where they want their life to go, it’s less than ideal for actually preparing them for what it means to be an independent member of society. A complete postsecondary education should not just teach students specialized fields of study but should also offer education on how to be successful in the future: how to successfully navigate the job market, how to manage personal finances, how to build a family if or when students wish to have one, and how to approach healthcare and insurance. Despite Swarthmore’s vast resources, I’ve observed that this second aspect seems to either be lacking in depth, or promoted as simply an optional experience, when these topics should be required learning in some capacity.
In order to understand if and how Swarthmore can improve, we must look at some of the main resources that are currently available. These examples are ones I found through either personal experience or digging through the college’s website; it is by no means a comprehensive list.
Perhaps the most widely known resource (at least by name) at Swarthmore is Career Services, the office that, as the name might suggest, organizes information and support for students and alumni navigating the job market. They provide a long and diverse list of resources, ranging from multiple job listing websites (Handshake, CareerShift, GoinGlobal), to mock interviews, reviews of resumes and cover letters, and even professional headshots and loaned formal attire for job interviews. Students and alumni can attend numerous events — whether they be job/career fairs, online seminars, or workshops — by signing up through Handshake or the Career Services website. These events also aren’t exclusively related to finding a job: for example, I am attending a two-part personal finance seminar at the end of October that I found through Handshake.
The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility provides advising and funding for academic or social justice related research projects, both throughout the scholastic year and over the summer. For the more entrepreneurial students, the Center for Innovation and Leadership (CIL) is the home for scholarships and stipends, and also helps students network with alumni and gain skills in entrepreneurship.
According to the First-Gen/Low-Income (FLI) Student Resource Guide (which can be found on the FLI website page under “Programs and Resources”), the Financial Aid office can provide yearly guides on how to do personal taxes. I’d be willing to bet that you could ask more personal finance questions in a one-on-one meeting, but there isn’t any information on this on the Financial Aid webpage. The FLI office both hosts events and has resources for FLI students that teach multiple different life skills.
There are also numerous student clubs and organizations related to educating for future success beyond college. Most clubs of this type focus on entrepreneurship, politics, social advocacy, and industry-specific work (the majority of these clubs are engineering–related). One club, SwatDoulas, teaches students about reproductive justice and childbirth and provides certification opportunities for students to become doulas, non-medical professionals that provide emotional and informational support to women on all aspects relating to reproduction (here’s a Phoenix article from 2016 with more details about the club if you’re curious).
One day, when I was passing through Parrish Hall’s west wing, I stopped to read the bulletin board outside of Career Services’ offices, and one graphic caught my eye. Though I do not remember the exact statistics it showed, it went something like this: graduates that had interacted with Career Services before their senior year made an average salary of around $70,000 their first year after college, whereas graduates that waited to meet with the office until their senior year or never met with the office made somewhere around $40-50,000.
Ignoring the fact that this data probably omits a great number of confounding variables, the central idea it presents is important: students who receive early education about the job market and economy fare better financially than those who receive a delayed or complete lack of an education on those topics.
If this general lack of participation is replicated across the other programs I’ve mentioned above (a trend which would not surprise me), I’m left with a major question: if there’s such a big difference in outcomes between the groups of students that participate early and those that participate either late or never, why are so many students ignoring these resources or waiting until the last minute to access it?
One potential answer to this question lies in the fact that Swarthmore students are busy. We tend to constantly overbook ourselves so that we can be involved in every single thing that we want to be involved in, even if it means missing sleep, work, or other extracurricular activities. It’s quite possible that, since these resources are not only time consuming, but also optional, that they get passed up for other activities. I know I’ve neglected to schedule a mock interview or a meeting with a Career Fellow because I told myself I was “too busy.”
But, from a broader societal perspective, our generation is incredibly apprehensive of the future. We’re experiencing an era of job searching marked by a bottomless pit of online listings that may or may not be real; AI models that are stealing current and future careers; an increasingly unaffordable housing market; feelings of political powerlessness in the face of an impossibly wealthy elite class; a worsening climate crisis we’re always running out of time to fix; a digital age that’s generated more loneliness and disconnect than ever before; and geopolitical injustices we are helpless to prevent on our own.
Just to name a few.
Perhaps we’re not engaging with the tools presented to us to prepare for our futures because, well, we don’t see any futures ahead.
So, taking all this thought into consideration, what can Swarthmore do to provide us with the resources for success in our futures?
I have three ideas.
First, we as students should teach each other as much as possible. In my brief research for this article, I stumbled across a personal finance column from 2015; I’ve read multiple sexual health columns from the past; and in the past two years on campus, I’ve had older classmates who have helped me navigate some of the resources that Swarthmore currently has (which mostly involved explaining how summer funding works). This is not to say that we should “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” but rather be open to communication and support so that we create unity in community. This could be in organized or informal groups that already exist, or we could create new groups that serve these educational needs specifically (both of which we’re already starting to do or have done in the past). Not only will this increase our available resources, it could increase morale and hope for our futures.
And second, even if it goes against the “liberal arts curriculum” we are so fond of, I would strongly advocate for some kind of required first year life skills seminar that covers everything from personal finance, to health, to insurance, to job market skills — all of it. The seminar would also ensure that students are informed about all the different options available at Swarthmore that deal with these topics so that we’re more prepared for our independent experiences.
Finally, regardless of whether or not Swarthmore makes this education required or keeps it optional (there’s certainly an argument for both sides), the college needs to be more vocal about all the resources it has. Emails every day are simply not enough. Consistent tabling is a good start, but I believe that even more can be done to increase visibility.
It’s also important to mention the ideas of other Swarthmore students with regards to this matter, since I am not the only one to have written about it. In February 2025, Bobby Zipp ’18 wrote an opinion piece in The Phoenix about the problems with student-alumni connection with respect to career preparedness. He brings up four main goals for the college to implement, all of which I would like to reiterate here: staff liaisons between academic departments and Career Services, more personnel in Career Services to support more students at once, an expansion of the externship program to connect alumni to current students, and a commitment to ensure lower-income and minority students have equal access to career training.
As college students, we are barreling towards our future at breakneck speeds, whether we are ready for it or not. And if we’re already investing our time, money, energy, and souls into our education here at Swarthmore, we must make certain that all that effort is being invested properly and holistically. College is more than the degree you graduate with; it’s a place to learn how to think about the world and how to be a successful adult. Making these changes, even some of them, could dramatically improve our own outcomes as well as support the outcomes for generations to come.
