Faculty Think They’re Preparing Students for Careers. Students Disagree.

The Findings

61% of faculty say they embed real-world projects in their courses. 26% of students report having experienced one. That 35-point gap is the defining number in this section, and it connects directly to something students are asking for: connecting their major to a career is the number one career readiness activity they want. Students who do participate in real-world projects are measurably more confident about their
career prospects.

61% of faculty report embedding real‑world projects, yet only 26% of students say they experience one.

faculty

students

76% vs. 68% students who completed a real-world project are more likely to say college is preparing them for a career.

students

67% of faculty say AI literacy is essential for student careers, but few are building it into course design.

faculty

The Breakdown

Something significant is getting lost between faculty intent and student experience. Whether it’s how the work is framed, whether students recognize it as career-connected, or whether it’s reaching the students who need it most, the gap is too wide to explain away.

Only 17% of faculty prioritize workforce readiness as a primary consideration in course design. The majority lead with academic content coverage (61%) and student engagement (60%). Career-connected learning is the most widely adopted workforce approach institutionally, but only 12% of institutions have scaled it across all departments.

Dr. Ford names the perception gap plainly. “The fact that 61% of faculty say, ‘Yup, I’m doing that, I’m providing opportunities for my students to get these real-world projects,’ and only one in four students are saying they’ve actually had that approach, that is very telling of what we think we are doing versus what’s actually happening. Even if you think you’re doing it, it’s not what learners are taking away, and that’s the biggest challenge.”

Dr. Ford is equally direct about what AI fluency means in this context, sharing that students need AI fluency to respond to the augmentation happening in the entry-level job market. This isn’t because those roles are disappearing completely, but because the skills required to succeed in them are shifting.

“47% of faculty and 61% of administrators say their job is changing because of AI,” she says. “So, if you’re having a lived experience that your job has changed, yet in the classroom you’re not reinforcing that reality for students, we have to figure that out.”

Institutions that embed AI literacy into course design are preparing students for the workforce they will actually enter, not the one that existed before.

Dr. Zone connects the workforce gap to the assessment conversation. “If we’re having real conversations about preparing students for the future of work, we also need to be having those conversations about experiential, problem-based approaches that we’ve long known are effective. But they’re historically difficult to design and even harder to assess. That’s the actual barrier.”

The Takeaway

Workforce readiness is being practiced in intention but not reliably in student experience. Institutions can:

Close the definition gap first. If faculty define workforce readiness as professional skills and students experience it as career uncertainty, the interventions won’t connect. Aligning on a shared definition that centers real-world application and AI literacy is the prerequisite to everything else.
Make career-connected learning visible to students, not just embedded by faculty. Students need to recognize when what they’re doing is career-relevant. That means framing, context and explicit connection to the world beyond the course.
Bring AI literacy into workforce readiness conversations explicitly. The majority of faculty believe students need AI skills for their careers. Far fewer are building those skills into course design.