By Ryan Craig,Senior Contributor

Copyright forbes

As the puck drops on a new hockey season, someone is killing all the goalies. In the past month we’ve lost Bernie Parent of the Philadelphia Flyers, Eddie Giacomin of the New York Rangers, and Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens. They were the best hockey goaltenders of my childhood. And because I was a goalie, I’m super-careful these days. More important, growing up in Toronto and playing goal, they were my heroes. Especially Ken Dryden, the Renaissance Goalie who lived a life worth celebrating.

Dryden grew up in Toronto in the 1950s and 60s, playing junior hockey and gaining admission to Cornell where he backstopped the Big Red to the 1967 NCAA championship. At the tail end of the 1970-71 season, he made it to the NHL with the Montreal Canadiens and took the league by storm, immediately winning the Stanley Cup and playoff MVP. Then he won the best trophy in sports five more times in the next eight years, as well as the Vezina (top goalie) five times.

At 6’4”, Dryden was the tallest goalie of his era. Accentuating his verticality in a horizontal game, when the puck was in the other team’s zone, he had a tendency to stack his left (glove) hand atop his right (blocker) hand, and lean forward on his stick. A photo of Dryden in this iconic pose hangs in my home (see below). After retiring in 1979, it was clear he hadn’t been resting; he’d been thinking. He chose Cornell not because of hockey – he never bothered to see the rink or meet the team – but because he’d been impressed by the chairman of the political science department. And at the height of his career with the Canadiens, in the midst of a contract dispute, he sat out an entire season and worked for a Toronto law firm making $135 a week. Most impressive, while playing professional hockey in Montreal, by burning the midnight oil and taking occasional leaves of absences, Dryden earned his law degree at McGill. He went on to come a successful lawyer, author, broadcaster, executive, member of parliament, and cabinet minister.

Worked at a decent job while earning a degree.
Bruce Bennett Studios via Getty Images

If Ken Dryden can win the Stanley Cup while going to law school, most students should be capable of holding down a job while pursuing a degree. In fact, most do. A 2024 GAO report estimated that 72% of college students work while enrolled, a number confirmed by a recent Trellis study showing two-thirds of undergraduates are employed. And it’s not merely a few hours here and there. 43% report working full-time and 38% say they work between 20-39 hours per week. Public Policy Institute of California estimates that working UC and CSU students earn an average of $23K while California community college students make over $30K. Women and underrepresented minorities are more likely to work while going to class. The primary reason: covering tuition and living expenses, or at least making a dent. For the vast majority it’s about getting by and trying to stay in school rather than gaining work experience that will facilitate or accelerate career launch after graduation.

Naturally, few of these jobs relate to their programs of study or career aspirations. Disconnected from academic programs or career launch goals, these jobs are predominantly frontline service positions in retail and food service, more easily done part-time and with effectively no barriers to entry.

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This is a big problem. Because relevant work experience is the most powerful lever for improving graduate employment outcomes. More powerful than major, skills-based curricula, or student support; Strada and Burning Glass showed that grads with at least one internship are nearly 50% less likely to be underemployed. This has increased the importance of noxious unpaid internships. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 43% of interns are unpaid. Which provides a massive advantage for students from wealthy backgrounds and with social capital (e.g., call my friend’s dad), as well as for (probably the same) students who don’t need to work through school to make ends meet. Even so, there aren’t even enough unpaid internships. In 2023, 8.2 million college students wanted internships but only 3.6 million paid + unpaid internships were available. Which explains why Pell Grant recipients are 30% less likely to land internships.

Most higher education leaders think they do a decent job of helping students find work while enrolled. And while career services offices list available internships and assist with applications, colleges are a long way from scoring a hat trick.

First, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program spends over $1.2 billion each year subsidizing the wages of about 600,000 student-workers at 3,000 colleges and universities. While enabling regulations dictate “institutions should award employment that will complement and reinforce each recipient’s educational program or career goals,” over 90% of FWS funding subsidizes on-campus jobs in dining halls, custodial, libraries, and labs. Virtually all the rest funds positions at local nonprofit organizations; a negligible amount – less than $1 million or < 0.1% – supports jobs at for-profit companies. Because only a fraction of on-campus and nonprofit positions provide relevant work experience to help graduates get good first jobs (i.e., off campus at for-profit companies), someone deserves two minutes in the penalty box. Schools aren’t entirely at fault: the current FWS formula favors on-campus jobs; participating employers are burdened by red tape (e.g., entering into a written agreement with the college outlining work conditions for students, committing not to displace existing employees with subsidized student-workers); current rules cap wage subsidies of “students employed with private for-profit organizations” at 25% of FWS allocations. Still, until Congress finally gets around to fixing FWS, there’s a long way between 0.1% and 25% (i.e., relevant internships for ~150,000 students). And most employers – national, regional, and local – would be surprised to learn they can hire students at a subsidized wage. Per the original 1964 legislation, the intent of FWS was financial aid, not career launch. Of course, back in 1964 college grads didn’t need relevant prior work experience to get a good first job. Recognizing this sea change, participating postsecondary institutions could be doing a lot more to educate companies, encourage them to hire students at a reduced wage, and shift student “jobs” to career-relevant internships. But $1.2 billion isn’t nearly enough to score an internship for every student. That will require inverting the shortage of relationship-based, highly inequitable internships to a surplus of in-field work experiences systematically available to every student regardless of their program of study. (Or if employers can’t be lined up for a given major, recognizing such as a sign that the program in question is past its sell-by date.) These are co-op programs, where student work is built into the academic calendar. Co-op students spend a term (or two or three) working at real jobs for real employers, then return to regularly scheduled classes. Co-op programs often require a fifth year, with the additional expense offset by earnings. Unfortunately, we’re also at the wrong end of the ice on co-ops. While co-ops are de rigueur in Montreal and across hockey’s homeland – nearly all large and mid-size Canadian universities (about 80 in total) allow students to alternate four-month terms with four-month in-field work experiences, sometimes completing four jobs before graduating – it’s possible to count the number of equivalent U.S. co-op programs on two hands. Northeastern is the most renowned and Cincinnati is the oldest. There’s also Drexel, Rochester Institute of Technology, RPI, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Kettering, and Elon. Add in a couple dozen more with co-ops for a handful of majors, usually engineering and business e.g., Georgia Tech, Purdue. And that’s pretty much it. By my count, less than 0.5% of American college students participate in formal co-op programs compared with perhaps 20% of their beer-drinking, Tim Horton’s-eating, hockey-playing confrères. Canada demonstrates it’s possible to make co-ops mainstream. It didn’t happen because Canadian employers are nicer (although they may be). Canadian universities long ago recognized the importance of relevant student work and allocated resources accordingly. Canadian universities built more robust and sophisticated employer interfaces, far beyond the typical career services function. Other countries are following Canada’s lead. China is in the midst of funding 1 million more internships per year, which sounds like a lot but isn’t because… China. And Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission just announced that “professional internships” will now be mandatory for all undergraduate degree programs. Every student will need to receive at least three credit hours for an internship. In order to meet the new mandate, Pakistan’s universities will need to reallocate resources from other uses to engage private and public sector employers. Reallocating resources to work from classrooms – or from student support, administration, or the myriad other things colleges and universities do besides equip students for career launch – is a paradigm shift that will require overcoming a bias against student work. The prevailing sentiment in academia – primarily among faculty and administrators who have never had a career-track position outside an academic institution – remains that while paid work is a necessary evil for students who need the money, it reduces time and attention on coursework and depresses student outcomes. All kinds of studies from 20+ years ago land here or in the environs. But this research is on the wrong kind of employment: financial aid jobs rather than career launch jobs. I’ve found no evidence that career launch jobs for students suppress academic outcomes and gobs of evidence that they’re predictive of (and verging on necessary for) economic outcomes. In the next few years, colleges and universities will have no choice but to pass some pucks from classrooms to work. The most obvious passing lane is to do more to engage employers. As with apprenticeships, internships don’t create themselves. They require companies willing to hire – or at least take on – student-workers who are unlikely to be particularly productive. And that means a diversion of resources from core business activities. So scoring internships through a maze of corporate defenders and obstacles requires a sales and marketing function well beyond current career services. It also demands other offensive firepower not commonly found at academic institutions like coordinating placement and onboarding or serving as the employer of record to free participating companies from costly and cumbersome hiring processes for short-term employees. The more internship functions schools take on (e.g., the way many health sciences programs arrange clinical placements), the easier it is to score internships. Last month Brandeis announced it would head down this road: going forward, every Brandeis student will need to complete at least one internship, apprenticeship, or the equivalent. Realistically, there’s a limit to how much colleges can do themselves. Microsoft or Bank of America won’t be establishing full-blown co-ops with hundreds of postsecondary institutions, no matter the marketing effort or turnkey solution. So closing the internship gap is a many-to-many problem crying out for intermediaries. Fortunately, they’re beginning to emerge to fill this critical space. Colleges should seek partnerships and perhaps act collectively to form new internship service providers. The other way to move the puck from classroom to work is something of a bank shot: colleges and universities not only facilitating, but attempting to create jobs themselves. I’ve written about how University of Iowa acquired two community papers so journalism students could work on them. Rather than leasing valuable retail space to Aramark or Starbucks, schools have begun handing over retail space to Saxbys, which sets up coffee shops and juice bars managed and staffed entirely by business students. If high schools can set up work experiences for student-musicians, why can’t colleges can’t do the same? And universities have already begun paying student-athletes. Major football and basketball programs are sharing as much as $20.5 million in broadcast and sponsorship revenue with athletes. Student-athletes aren’t employees yet, but that may change. For most students, the bank shot will look something like present day law school clinics with a mix of public, philanthropic, and university funding: psychology and sociology majors delivering social services; political science students supporting legal aid and advocacy organizations; finance and accounting students serving local businesses. So with Bethel University’s recent job guarantee announcement – henceforth the Twin Cities school will employ all (qualifying) unemployed grads 6+ months out – I imagine Bethel will consider options like these. Plus, they’re a great opportunity for faculty looking to achieve impact beyond teaching, research, and writing. In his memoir The Game, Ken Dryden contemplates the words written on the wall of the Montreal Canadiens dressing room: To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high. The line about fallen soldiers in World War I is from the Canadian poem In Flanders Fields and signifies commitment to the winning tradition of Canadiens legends like Maurice “Rocket” Richard and Jean Béliveau (and now Ken Dryden and his teammate, the dashing Guy Lafleur whom we lost a few years ago). If they hope to continue winning, classroom-only colleges and universities will have no choice but to throw the torch to new leaders with new ideas. Most schools will need to pursue both paths: investing in muscular employer engagement (i.e., universal clinical placement) while simultaneously reimagining on-campus employment (i.e., universal clinics). The good news: there are few long-term problems in higher education that a surplus of in-field, career-path, paid jobs for students won’t solve. Northeastern has demonstrated it’s possible to not only differentiate, but reach elite status in this way. Soon, other innovative institutions will show it’s not a fluke, but – as in Canada – the new normal for attracting tuition-paying students. Brandeis seems to have already determined it’s the best and perhaps only way to save liberal arts and humanities programs. But make no mistake, the puck needs to move. Otherwise, tomorrow’s students will be shut out. Not by the late, great Ken Dryden, who had 56 shutouts, including 10 in the Stanley Cup playoffs. But by the labor market. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions