I work for a university, both as a teacher and as an internal employee, I also studied at the same university. It's not unusual for staff to have studied at the

I work for a university, both as a teacher and as an internal employee, I also studied at the same university. It's not unusual for staff to have studied at the uni and many of my professional colleagues guest lecture, though I am the only tutor as far as I know. (Australian uni, so words may have different meanings to American's). Prior to joining the uni I was a big4 consultant and general know it all :D Anyway, as a strategy consultant I often ask myself what would we do differently if we were starting higher education from scratch. Every country I've looked at has a slightly different take on tertiary education and my own ideas are clearly biased by the Australian experience. In Australia we usually have to pick our major before we finish high school. There is, as far as I know, nothing comparable to the US 2-4 year degree that is basically a choose your own adventure (I could joke about Arts degrees, but sadly not enough people do them and even then my story below holds true). This puts a lot of pressure on people to pick the "right" degree to support their career goals, often before they know what their career will be. (Heck I'm almost 40 and still trying to figure it out). However another side effect of this is you end up in an echo chamber of classes with other like minded students studying basically the same things, and you rarely get the wider experience outside of your major. Example: I start a degree in Computer Science, in most of my classes all my peers are also CS students, and while sometimes there will be a few randoms who pick a subject for complimentary skills (Maths students studying programming so they can get better at R; economics students, same reason) these students aren't as 'good' as the CS students so no one wants to group with them, and they don't sit in any of the existing cliques. Ultimately this leaves a lot of people with a very limited network of people after uni. The CS majors don't have the contacts they need from the Business school or the Law school to be able to find opportunities for new ventures, or to recommend them into other opportunities and vice versa. So I think I'd start by looking at how we can encourage the development of these communities further. For now I give most of my mentees a copy of Never Eat Alone and hope they read it and take it to heart.