Students want value this semester, not a degree payoff three years out

Higher education has spent the better part of two decades measuring itself against completion. Get students in, get them through, count the degrees. But the students who leave before finishing have been telling a different story, and it is not mainly about difficulty or cost in the abstract. It is about timing. A degree promises a payoff at the end of two and a half or three years. For a working adult with a family, that horizon can feel too distant to justify another semester of tuition and time.

That gap is what pushed Brandy Papaden Smith's team at Arizona State University to reframe the problem. Smith is senior director in University College at ASU, where she leads the Work plus Learn unit. Over the last three to four years, as her team studied noncompleters, one theme kept surfacing: students questioning whether the experience was worth their time and money right now. "I need to feel value now," Smith said, describing the sentiment. "I need to feel like it is worth me continuing to make that commitment of my time and my financial resources."

From time to completion to time to value

The shift Smith describes is from time to completion to time to value. The question becomes whether a degree can deliver incremental, felt value along the way instead of deferring all of it to graduation. For ASU's large online population, most of whom work full time, that might mean a course project with an employer that a student can describe to a boss the following semester, or a micro credential earned alongside the degree that sharpens a specific skill set. Each is a moment where the learner can point to something concrete before the full credential arrives.

Student employment is the clearest example ASU can point to. Through its Work Plus initiative, and the national Work Plus Collective of 37 partner institutions, the university has redesigned on-campus part-time jobs so they aim for learning outcomes similar to an internship. Students typically work on campus in their first year or two and pursue external internships later. If those early jobs are transactional, a paycheck and a shift, the value is deferred. If they are built around skill development and tied to what the student wants after graduation, a first-year student working 15 to 18 hours a week can leave that year ready to talk to an employer about an internship sooner than they otherwise would have been.

The unfair bargain built into the degree

Smith extends the argument beyond employment into the curriculum itself, and here her critique of the sector is sharper. Students said yes to one thing when they enrolled: the degree program. Yet as internships have become the expected route to real-world experience, institutions have effectively told students the degree alone will not get them career-ready, and the missing piece lives outside the university's walls. "That the thing that they said yes to was the degree program that's supposed to prepare them and help them be ready for a career opportunity day one after graduation. But our argument to say that, no. To get the real-world experience, you have to go do something else. It doesn't seem fair," she said. Viewed through an equity lens, students without the time or means to take on off-campus work are the ones left short.

The remedy ASU is pursuing is work integrated learning scaffolded across the degree: lower-lift experiences such as job shadows or simulations in the early years, then course-embedded projects designed and guided by industry partners who give students direct feedback, then internships or co-ops. Smith is candid that none of this is easy. Curriculum approval and accreditation processes exist for good reasons but rarely allow a quick response to what employers say they need. The workable paths so far include using elective space deliberately, pairing applied-experience courses with required major courses, and partnering with faculty skilled enough in instructional design to change how approved learning outcomes are achieved without reopening the outcomes themselves. Not every employer project fits every course, and the vetting takes time.

Design with students, not for them

What ties the campus work and the national collective together is method. Smith's team uses user-centered design, spending time with supervisors, student employees, and administrators before proposing anything. She admits higher education practitioners are trained to jump to solutions, and that many programs built by staff committees over 12 to 18 months launch to student indifference because no student was ever consulted in the design. Across the collective, that discipline has surfaced very different starting points. Some institutions already had strong structures and needed programmatic content, such as online modules completed on the clock, backed by a commitment of 15 paid professional development hours a semester for student employees. Others discovered systems-level problems first, including hiring processes that quietly excluded certain students from employment altogether, and had to fix those before redesigning anything.

Student employment, as Smith puts it, is not a top-of-mind priority for most university leadership, which is why the Work Plus Collective was structured to bring outside resources and peer momentum to it. Grant funding launched the effort in late 2021, and ASU continues to support it while seeking additional funders. Smith is realistic that institutionalizing these changes is a multiyear process at every campus, and that her team underestimated that early on. But the underlying case does not depend on any one program surviving. Students are asking for value they can feel this semester, and institutions that keep answering with a promise about three years from now will keep losing them along the way.