When Gina Petersen graduated with her associate degree from Kirkwood Community College two years ago, she described it as “the biggest accomplishment I have ever done.”

As a returning adult college student, she had struggled to fit her studies in part time, online, while working as a trainer for a tech company. She had gotten that job through connections, and she hoped that a college degree would be a big help if she ever needed to find a new job in the future.

We told the story of Petersen’s college journey — which took her more than seven years and a couple of false starts to complete — as part of a three-part podcast series we did in 2022 called Second Acts.

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For this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast, we checked back in with Petersen to see what the degree has meant for her professional and personal life.

And we found that the credential has not opened as many doors as she had hoped.

A few months after we last talked to Gina, she got laid off from her training job after 10 years at the company. And at first she quickly found a project manager position through her networks. But she felt the job wasn’t a good fit, so she quit after a little more than a year, hoping she’d quickly find another position.

What she encountered, however, was a job market that suddenly felt much more daunting.

“I’ve sent my resume to, I’d say, 150 different places for 150 different roles, and yet, nothing,” she says, even after getting professional help crafting her resume.

What’s worse, she says, she has been ghosted by employers when she does get initial interest. “I’ve had two people reach out for phone interviews and say, ‘Yes’ and confirm, and then I literally don’t get called,” she says.

Petersen is not alone, according to labor market experts.

Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, notes that because it has become easier to apply for jobs, thanks to one-click applications on company websites and the growth of platforms like Linkedin, job seekers have more opportunities than ever. But they also have to work harder to find the right fit as a result. Whereas once it might be common to apply to 15 jobs, now it’s not unusual to have to apply to more than 150, he says.

“Now, you’re applying to a lot more things – you’re getting more cracks at the bat — but you’re just getting a lot more rejections,” Berger says.

That can feel demoralizing to job candidates, he adds, while also hard for employers as they struggle to sift through a flood of applicants.

Meanwhile, Berger says that the number of jobs for recent graduates has fallen in recent years, and just having a degree is not as guaranteed a “meal ticket” as in the past.

“College graduates still get generally better-paying jobs than people who don’t have a college degree, and there’s a wider range of opportunities available to them when they’re looking for a job,” he says. “But if you’re looking at how much of a boost it provides, probably it’s smaller than it was in the past.”

Even so, Petersen says she is glad she got her degree, as she learned valuable skills in college that she put to use in her job. But she isn’t looking to go back for more higher education at this point.

Hear more about Petersen’s search, trends in hiring and what colleges can do to respond to this changing landscape on this week’s EdSurge Podcast.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

When Robert Ubell first applied for a job at a university's online program back in the late ’90s, he had no experience with online education. But then again, hardly anyone else did either.

First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (something like the way AI chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were even trying to deliver courses on it. Ubell’s experience was in academic publishing, and he had recently finished a stint as the American publisher of Nature magazine and was looking for something different. He happened to have some friends at Stanford University who had shown him what the university was doing using the web to train workers at local factories and high-tech businesses, and he was intrigued by the potential.

So when he saw that Stevens Institute of Technology had an opening to build online programs, he applied, citing the weekend he spent observing Stanford’s program.

“That was my only background, my only experience,” he says, “and I got the job.”

And as at many college campuses at the time, Ubell faced resistance from the faculty.

“Professors were totally opposed,” he says, fearing that the quality would never be as good as in-person teaching.

The story of how higher ed went from a reluctant innovator to today — when more than half of American college students take at least one online course — offers plenty of lessons for how to try to bring new teaching practices to colleges.

One big challenge that has long faced online learning is who will pay the costs of building something new, like a virtual campus.

Ubell points to philanthropic foundations as key to helping many colleges, including Stevens, take their first steps into online offerings.

And it turns out that the most successful teachers in the new online format weren’t ones who were the best with computers or the most techy, says Frank Mayadas, who spent 17 years at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation giving out grants hoping to spark adoptions of online learning.

“It was the faculty who had a great conviction to be good teachers who were going to be good no matter how they did it,” says Mayadas. “If they were good in the classroom, they were usually good online.”

We dig into the bumpy history of online higher education on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. And we hear what advice online pioneers have for those trying the latest classroom innovations.

Check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.

SkillRise, an ISTE initiative, examined job seekers’ perceptions of digital skills and skills-based technologies, focusing on their potential career impacts, from initial hiring to advancement. The findings from this 2024 research confirmed job seekers’ need for digital skills training and increased awareness about how skills-based tools can be used to thrive in school and at work.

Recommended Resources

• Read the full ISTE research report: Job Seeker Pathway Needs
• Learn more about this topic through a micro-learning experience: Explore Skills-based Technologies

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