Teresa E. Simpson¹, Mahdi Safa^2,, Alexandra Sokolova³, Paul G. Latiolais⁴

The growing concern about employment outcomes adds to existing pressures on students to make career decisions early in the college experience. This study was designed to investigate the alignment of student career readiness obtained through quality programming targeting student success learning outcomes as designed by student affairs practitioners at Texas public institutions to those employers surveyed by The Hart Association for the American Association of College and Universities. This study revealed that there is an alignment between student affairs learning outcomes and employer’s expectations for career readiness. The results of this study show a need for common terminology across constituent groups making the student more comfortable in using their co-curricular activities as transferable skills during the interview process. An ideal co-curricular experience that will merge the development of such common langue is an innovative First Year Experience Course as presented in this article.

interdisciplinary courses, planning and designing courses, project-based learning, experiential learning