Thoughts on Hacking College: Part One
In my first week as dean at California Lutheran University (day two actually!) a colleague gave me a copy of the book Hacking College by Ned Laff and Scott Carlson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.) Published last year, it is a timely book and one that is helping shape a reimagined and integrated student experience at California Lutheran University. Since I’ll play a part in this process of implementing a revitalized model of advising and mentoring, I have been diving into this book. From the start, I have been impressed with its conceptual framework and theoretical underpinning.
The aim of the book is to outline “how college faculty and
staff can help students "hack" their college experience through a
proactive, personalized approach to success.” Hacking College brings awareness
for faculty and staff of some features of the student experience that are
critical to their success both in college and beyond. The authors advocate a “field
of study” approach which takes a wider, more dynamic, and potentially more integrated
look at a student’s college and career path than does just a singular focus on “the
major.”
Key concepts include the ideas of hidden intellectualism,
vocational purpose and wicked problems, social and cultural capital, and the
hidden job market.
In this blog post and the next, I discuss a few of their
key concepts. Today I start with hidden intellectualism and move on to the
hidden job market. I was struck by these two “hidden” concepts, both of which
offer a lot of potential to open up rich conversations with students at each
stage of their college journey.
The idea of “hidden intellectualism” is the understanding that
every student has interests and curiosities from their lived experiences that,
if leveraged, can help them find intrinsic motivation to pursue learning and
intellectual development. “Students arrive on campus as latent intellectuals already
possessing these interests.”
To me, this is one way of recognizing the latent capacity
that all students have, whether they know it or not. Faculty mentors, with the
right questions and guidance, can tap into this latent intellectualism and help
students find a path that is intellectually energizing for them based on subjects
and experiences that are already of interest to them.
The “hidden job market” are those jobs that people don’t easily
see—jobs that are not readily visible for someone without deeper awareness of
the field or connections within it. A great example that one of my faculty offered
is music production. While a student might envision being a music producer as their
career goal, there are actually many more numerous roles in a music studio and
in music production that they may find fulfilling.
To me, this concept reinforces the importance not only of
internships but of universities fostering corporate, community, and
professional partnerships that give students exposure throughout their college
years to the wide range of paths they could follow in a particular field. The
extent to which faculty engage in these partnerships only enhances the
mentoring they are able to offer their students and the connections they are
able to facilitate.
The cool thing about paying attention to these concepts
(and the others I will discuss in the next post), is that they strongly suggest that a student can pursue any major—even those that are not directly linked to
a specific career outcome—and find themselves well prepared not only for a
great job, but also for a meaningful life. This, in essence, is the promise of
liberal arts, though this promise may seem challenging to trust in today’s climate of uncertainty and doubt in higher education where students and parents are seeking direct career
pathways.
The overall idea of the book is that a field of study
approach, when implemented intentionally, validates both the major (any major!) and the student experience outside of the
classroom as valuable in shaping their college experience and their life beyond
college.
The authors claim: “Linking awareness of students’ latent
intellectualism, vocational purpose, wicked problems [i.e., the ‘problem’ of their
career choices], and the hidden job market can help administrators rebuild
enrollments in disciplines typically written off as non-vocational.”
How that might work in practice is what I explore in part two.
