Opinion: How you spend time in college will impact your earning potential

By David F. Shutler

Soon, a large cohort of freshly minted high school graduates will be getting ready to head for college. Amid plans for moving into dorm rooms and picking first semester classes, many are also wondering how they’ll pay back the debt they’re taking on.

Here’s some powerful advice that people don’t usually consider. It can be taken on day one of college — and even before: Be intentional about how you spend your time while in college.

That’s right. How you spend your time in college will impact your earning potential after graduation. And this, of course, will play a key role in your ability to pay off loans.

By “how you spend your time,” I mean not only what you major in and the classes you take, but also, what you do outside of academics, since extracurricular activities help build valuable job market skills. These, in turn, will help you find a job that will help you both support yourself and pay off any loans.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Here are the areas I recommend college students think about before starting college, and plan to invest their time in while there:

• Choose a major that will open the door to the best possible career.

Of course, you should choose a major in a field that you actually want to work in, but keep in mind that there is wide variation in the starting salaries from one major to another. According to recent Indeed.com data, engineering degree graduates start with the highest starting salaries out of all the majors, at an average of $69,188 per year.

Contrast that with early childhood education majors, who can expect to earn only $39,097 their first year out of college, a difference of $30,000. And while salary certainly isn’t everything, it does determine how easily and how quickly you’ll be able to pay back any loans you’ve taken to pay for college. (The University System of Georgia has a website that includes information about post-graduate earnings for its degree programs.)

• Take electives and get involved in extracurricular activities that will help you develop the soft skills needed to land a job and be effective in the workplace.

Not every degree holder will graduate with all of the necessary skills to succeed in the professional world. That’s because some of the most critical skills needed aren’t necessarily taught (or learned) in college. Three of the most important “soft skills” are conversational skills, persuasion skills, and analytical skills. The ability to converse comfortably with another person can mean the difference between getting a job offer or being passed over. Likewise, hiring managers value persuasive employees because these are the individuals who sell products, make deals, and establish beneficial connections with other companies and promote valuable services.

Lastly, the ability to analyze data, evaluate the credibility of a data source, and assign proper weight to the various factors in a decision process will give you the tools necessary to ensure that the most important elements receive the strongest consideration during the decision-making process.

Electives such as philosophy or public speaking could be valuable to develop your persuasive skills. And consider exploring the myriad of student-run clubs that most universities offer, such as debate. The point of these exercises is for you to acquire skills because it is those skills that matter most over the long run. And college is a great place to do it.

• Spend time with your professors, who can help you forge valuable professional connections.

Many students think of networking in college as primarily between students. After all, who hasn’t imagined having the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg as their college roommate? But the most powerful networking opportunities in college are actually with your professors rather than with your peers. Better yet, most professors are actually required to hold office hours so that interested students can have access to them. Take advantage of this access and get to know your professors.

After all, they are often the ones asked by alumni and hiring managers to recommend students for internships, summer jobs, and the like. Likewise, take advantage of your university’s alumni network to meet former students who work in your chosen field or even perhaps in your dream job. With a shared university background in common, many alumni will be willing to at least talk with you and give their opinions and advice on how to break into the field in which they’re already working.

• Get a part-time job either through work-study or off-campus employment to gain real-life experience.

There’s no substitute for the real-world experience you gain through working, whether part-time or as part of a work-study program. At a minimum, you’ll learn how to work on a team, how to be a reliable and trustworthy employee, and how to solve problems. Whether it’s in your chosen field or not, a college job will strengthen your resume and help you stand out from the other graduates who didn’t gain work experience during college.

These important steps are just part of my recommendations to graduating high schoolers, mapped out in my book, for escaping what I refer to as the “student loan matrix,” a set of 12 assumptions about the college experience that increase the danger of getting stuck with excessive college debt.