University gets international recognition for employability
Over the last few years, Tom Halasz thinks USC has gotten much better about finding students jobs — and making sure they’re prepared for them.
The director of the Career Center said the university’s built up a staff of six people who focus on employer outreach in South Carolina and the Southeast, and he credited that effort with growth in the number of job and internship listings posted for students.
From the 2007-08 academic year, in the peak of the Great Recession, to 2011-12, the number of full-time job listings has grown 34.5 percent, and the number of internship openings is up 138 percent, Halasz said.
The center hopes to grow those numbers further by reaching out to alumni more effectively, he said.
In the past, USC has sent emails to alumni asking them to let the Career Center know if their companies have openings, but they haven’t had much incentive to do so. The alumni had no relationship with the students who eventually apply, and the process hasn’t been particularly appealing, Halasz said.
The university’s not entirely sure what alumni would want in a new process, so it’s been talking to alumni on campus and plans to meet with groups in Charlotte, N.C. and Washington, D.C., next semester to get a sense for their needs, and the Career Center is thinking of how else it could make sending in job information easier, Halasz said.
It’s also gotten the Alumni Association more involved in generating job leads, and it wants to leverage that network with initiatives like competitions between alumni chapters to post the most job openings.
Still, as it does so, its focus is mostly on the Southeast.
“When we’ll be out in L.A. (to meet with alumni), I can’t say,” Halasz said.
Experiential education in internships and co-ops has also been an increased focus of the Career Center, he said, and it was a focus during the recession, when USC paid employers with federal stimulus money to take students in the Community Internship Program, when those companies were generally cutting back on internship programs.
“In my mind, that really makes a difference,” Halasz said of the emphasis on internships.
The effort was marked in October by the university’s listing in the 2012 Global Employability Survey, which was released in the International Herald Tribune and compiled by a French consulting firm, Emerging, and recruiting research group, Trendence, in Germany.
The survey interviewed thousands of recruiters and top executives at companies in more than twenty countries on what schools throughout the world they thought produced the most employable graduates.
On a list of 150 universities, USC ranked No. 133, one of three Southeastern Conference schools and the only in South Carolina to make the cut. Vanderbilt University ranked No. 134, and the University of Florida ranked No. 137. Last year, only Vanderbilt and Florida made the list from the SEC, at No. 89 and No. 106, respectively.
Some of the ranking, Halasz said, owes to the national recognition several of USC’s programs have received, though the university’s overall rankings haven’t moved much in the past few years. Otherwise, he said, graduates have benefitted from improvement in the state’s economy.
Still, he said, it’s hard to nail down just what pushed USC onto the list.
“I see that as a piece of it,” Halasz said of the internship initiative. “We always want to come up with a simple explanation for things that are occurring ... This is the result of a number of things coming together.”