Fact 1: If you graduate from college, you’re more likely to get a full-time job than if you hadn’t. Fact 2: If you graduate from college, you’ll probably enjoy higher lifetime earnings than if you hadn’t. Fact 3: If you graduate from college, you’re less likely to be engaged in your work than if you hadn’t. 

That’s right—less likely. To be fair, Fact 3 doesn’t reflect much of a difference: According to a Gallup survey released in 2018, only 28.3 percent of graduates are “involved in and enthusiastic about” their work, compared to 32.7 percent of people who didn’t go beyond high school. Even so, Brandon Busteed of Gallup Education finds the survey results “really stunning. Given that what we all expect out of college is something better,” he explains, “you’d think that college graduates are way more engaged in careers than everybody else.” 

Does the apparent problem lie with colleges or with workplaces? Not surprisingly, the answer is both. Let’s start with colleges. First of all, it doesn’t appear to make any difference what kind of college a person went to—large or small, public or private, prestigious or mid-tier public: The percentages not only of those engaged at work but of those “thriving” in all areas of personal “well-being” are roughly the same (with graduates of for-profit schools faring not quite as well). 

It would appear, then, that colleges of all types are failing to provide the kinds of experiences that result in high levels of workplace engagement. Have you, for example, encountered a professor who cared about you personally, got you excited about learning, or encouraged you to pursue your dreams? If so, you have been “emotionally supported,” and your odds of being engaged at work (and of thriving in your well-being) have probably doubled. Have you had a job or internship that let you apply what you’ve been learning in college, worked on any projects that took a semester or more to complete, or been involved in extracurricular activities? If you’ve had the advantage of these forms of “experiential and deep learning,” you’re also twice as likely to be engaged and thriving. Unfortunately, only 14 percent of graduates could answer yes to the first set of criteria and only 6 percent to the second set. As for all six experiences, a mere 3 percent said yes. On individual measures, although 63 percent said that a teacher had fired them up about a subject, only 32 percent had ever worked on a long-term project, and only 22 percent had found mentors who encouraged them. 

“It’s literally about higher education in general,” suggests Busteed. “There’s something about the process and the experience that’s preventing graduates from getting to a place where they’re doing what they’re best at.” Busteed suspects that, without strong mentorship, college students fail to set clear career paths and, as a result, too many of them fall into one of two traps: (1) getting stuck in jobs for which they’re overqualified or (2) resorting to such “fallback” career paths as law school and investment banking. “I think we’re kind of caught up in preconceived notions of what success should look like,” says Busteed, “and it’s landing a lot of college graduates in the wrong place.” Some educators agree. “The particular value of [the Gallup] survey,” says Harold V. Hartley III, senior VP of the Counsel of Independent Colleges, “is that it looks at outcomes that are different from the outcomes that we typically look at— like did you get a job, what’s your salary, and those kinds of things.” 

Not surprisingly, however, many educators are unconvinced that colleges should bear the brunt of the survey’s findings. “There’s kind of a half-empty, halffull story here,” says Alexander McCormick, director of the National Survey of Student Engagement. He points out, for instance, that the survey classifies 55 percent of the respondents as “not engaged” and argues that although these people are not emotionally connected to their workplaces, neither are they dissatisfied with them. Philip D. Gardner, director of Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, adds that the Gallup survey fails to account for differences in individual goals and goal-oriented behavior. Highly educated people, he observes, don’t settle into jobs as quickly as most people, and younger workers are less likely to consider work critical to their identities or well-being 

Mark Schneider, VP of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit organization that conducts social science and behavioral research, contends that the Gallup survey reveals interesting correlations (between, for example, college and workplace experiences) but falls short in providing any causative explanations. Take, for example, a graduate who reports the following correlation: She had an internship at college and is engaged in her work. What if this graduate was personally motivated to find the internship and is engaged in her work because she brings the same level of personal motivation to her job? The Gallup survey suggests that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the college experience (the internship) and the workplace experience (engagement). The conclusion, however, does not necessarily follow because personal motivation may be the most significant factor in both experiences.

A critical question, it would seem, remains unaddressed: Which motivational behavior came first—acting on personal motivation (such as seeking the experience of the internship) or acting on learned motivation (such as applying the lessons learned through the internship to the postgraduation workplace)? Even Busteed admits that the survey’s results may suffer from a “chicken-and-egg problem.” 

Which brings us to the implications of the survey results for business. As we’ve already seen, the survey is ultimately as much concerned with productivity and motivation in the workplace as with workplace preparation in college. According to Busteed, the survey’s findings provide “a formula for something that alters life and career trajectory. . . .It’s all actionable, by way of who we hire and how we incentivize and reward.” The report thus suggests that colleges should do a better job of preparing students to get jobs in workplaces in which they’ll be engaged—that is, in which they’ll be working at something that they’re good at and like for organizations that care about their work. 

Philip Gardner, for one, thinks that the problem reflects workplace experiences as much as higher-education experiences. “I don’t mind people throwing darts at higher ed, but it doesn’t have to take the blame for everything,” he says, and many researchers and consultants feel that employers should focus more clearly on the personal motivation that each individual brings to the workplace. According to The Fortune Group, for instance, which provides personal-development training for businesses, “motivation is internal and personal. Within each person, there has to be that drive or will to succeed, and if it’s not there, no one can synthetically put it there.” .

If a company wants to increase “motivation and engagement in the workplace,” says the consultancy, it must “create a climate or an environment in which people’s natural abilities and internal motivations are allowed to come to the fore.” In fact, The Fortune Group operates on the assumption that “employees don’t perform because someone or something interferes with their desire or ability to perform.” Task interference, for example, “could be something the employee doesn’t have, such as proper resources, tools, or training.” Another form of interference, consequence imbalance, occurs when employees are “doing the right things but aren’t getting recognition for it.” Like task interference, it should be classified as “mismanagement” because it “creates an imbalance that interferes with people’s desire and/ or ability to perform.

Case Questions 

1. Consider each of the following perspectives on motivation: needs hierarchy, two-factor theory, expectancy theory, equity theory, and goal-setting theory. How does each of these perspectives depend on learned motivation? On personal motivation? 

2. What about you? Which form of motivation—learned motivation or personal motivation—has played a greater role in your pursuit of your goals, whether in school, at work, or in both areas? Given this assessment of your own experience with motivation, which of the motivational perspectives listed in Question 1 is most likely to help you in your work life? Whatever your answers to these questions, be sure to give examples from your own experience. 

3. The theory that too few students get the help they need in setting clear career paths suggests that colleges should provide more career counseling. However, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement, only 43 percent of college seniors talked very often or often about career plans with a faculty member or adviser; 39 percent did sometimes, and 17 percent never did. How about you? Have you sought career advice or counseling from resources available at your school? Do you plan to? Have you sought advice elsewhere? If so, where elsewhere and why elsewhere? 

4. The Gallup survey measured levels of engagement by asking respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with several statements about postgraduation work experiences. Here are six of those statements: 

• I have opportunities to learn and grow. 

• My opinions seem to count. 

• I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. 

• I have the tools and resources I need to do my job.  

• My supervisor encourages my development. 

• I know what is expected of me. 

List these six statements in their order of importance to you as probable factors in your satisfaction with a job. Be prepared to discuss your priorities.

One of these statements proved to be the strongest predictor of workplace engagement among all of the statements in the survey. Your instructor can tell you which one it is after you’ve drawn up and discussed your list.