I went to one of the schools mentioned, and am active in alumni affairs in my city. I also have a liberal arts degree. I don't think these numbers work. And

I went to one of the schools mentioned, and am active in alumni affairs in my city. I also have a liberal arts degree. I don't think these numbers work. And I see it in the fact that alumni affairs is beefing up its career services portion of its events. There is a recognition that if donations are to continue, then understanding that the careers they were sending kids off to based on prestige are slowly disappearing, and that the adults that had those careers are starting to transition into something else. I'm also not 100% convinced that career offices at liberal arts schools are prepared for this. While I'm actually fairly happy with what I learned (because I can see it taught me to both think analytically about various subjects and communicate what I thought), I also can see that the traditional preparation has absolutely nothing to do with the well paying jobs out there. Further, when I finally figured out some ideas of what I was interested in late in college, my career office actually had no idea how these positions work or what they are like in real life. I'm not sure they still do either, based on other times I've interacted with graduates. Many of them fell into what they did based on their connections (which all the schools mentioned provide, no doubt), including myself, at times. Based off resumes I've seen, particularly for technical marketing type roles (which I've seen more of, so I can comment about that), the internships don't seem to fully provide a good glimpse of what they know (and can vary hugely), or if they fully understand what goes on in these positions. Further, internships up until recently mattered very little - as the school could provide connections. Weirdly, I don't blame the school at all. I'm more appalled that they admitted to me at graduation that I should take an unpaid internship (height of the recession) because they figured that most students could afford to effectively work their first jobs unpaid to get skills for jobs they don't know how to connect people to. This is not going to change until they get more alumni with a wider range skills, so, hence, above. TL:DR Schools are doing this because up until now they could send their kids into jobs. Now well-paid careers are shifting, and they can't. This matches up with the rise of internships and stories like these. Meh.