In 2006, my research team and I wanted to explore the need for, and awareness of, the career services at UWM.  We showed that a over 500 UWM students indicated difficulties with career decisions, had high levels of psychological distress, and low levels of psychological well-being and that about half of students were aware of career services but much fewer had used those services (Fouad, et al, 2006, Journal of Career Assessment).  Based on these results, the Director of the Career Development Center and I advocated to greatly expand the undergraduate coursework to include career decision-making.  Over 10 years later, we have been able to work with 400 students a year, to help them learn more about their career decision-making, and have been able to research how well this class works.  Currently, in partnership from the Career Planning & Resource Center, The Career Exploration Course Initiative engages doctoral students in counseling psychology at UWM by recruiting them to teach EDPSY 110 (Planning your Career and Major) and EDPSY 212 (Career Development in a Multicultural Workplace). Counseling psychology doctoral students work with undergraduates to help them understand that career development happens in the greater context of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other salient contexts. These courses are designed to assist students, many of whom have not attended college before, in gaining the skills necessary for major exploration and career planning. EDPSY 110 focuses on major exploration through a self-reflective process where students identify their interests, skills, values, and salient facets of their own identity necessary to make a major decision. EDPSY 212 expands on this foundation by teaching students to examine workplaces they are interested in through a critical diversity lens. Students gain exposure to their interested workplace and engage in the career planning process while also reflecting on the current state of justice in their intended workplace.

As a counseling psychologist and counseling psychologists in training who are committed to social justice, we are committed to a research program that evaluates the efficacy of these courses for the purpose of improving them. My research team selects variables for measurements of efficacy and career decision-making that are consistent with the latest developments in vocational psychology research. As such, these courses have been studied a number of times and will continually be studied. A summary of our findings is below:

• My students and I examined the efficacy of EDPSY 110 through the context of social cognitive career theory (Fouad, Cotter, & Kantemneni, 2009). The results from that study suggested students’ career decision-making difficulties decreased overall, self-efficacy increased overall, but  perceptions of barriers did not change.
• This course has been the subject of two student poster presentations at the American Psychological Association Convention.  Interestingly, in both cases we did not see significant rises in career decision-making outcome expectations though we did see significant rises in career decision-making self-efficacy.
• Recently, The Office of Assessment and Institutional Research at UWM examined overall retention rates, graduate rates, and major declaration across freshman cohorts in years 2005-2013 for EDPSY 110. When all cohorts were considered together, students who successfully completed the course in their first semester took significantly less time to declare a major and graduate than students who were not enrolled in the course. Care should be taken when generalizing these findings, as there may be a self-selection effect in the data. In other words, students who take the course may already be more likely to declare a major and persist to graduation.

We are looking to continually examine the efficacy of these courses on student retention and major declaration. Our current plan going forward is to continually develop an understanding of psychological factors and social barriers that play a role in major choice, active engagement in the process of career development, and retention.