What If a College Degree Came With Guaranteed Employment?

As tuition rises at postsecondary institutions across the country, it only makes sense that prospective students are worried about whether they’ll find gainful employment after graduation. At one university, they’ve decided to double down and give students a massive incentive to attend: a guaranteed job.
DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana, already has a solid rate of employment for it’s graduates: 95%. But Mark McCoy, DePauw’s president, decided that wasn’t good enough to lure students who were afraid a liberal arts degree wasn’t the best path to a job. As Doug Lederman writes in Inside Highter Ed, McCoy said, “People seem to be saying, if you get a liberal arts education, you’ve precluded the possibility of ever getting a job.”
So the university has declared that any student who doesn’t find an “entry-level professional position” or entrance to grad school will be awarded a full-time position for at least six months. (The alternative is a free additional semester of classes.)
This model might not be possible for larger institutions (DePauw only has an annual graduating class of 500), but in a world where students are taking on massive debt for schooling, it’s an intriguing policy that just might lure more students into liberal arts fields.