One of the issues that I’ve discussed off and on here for the past year has been the great disparity between graduate students’ socialization and the realities many of them will face on the academic job market.

Graduate school is generally focused on developing students’ research skills, with faculty members — especially at the most prestigious institutions — mainly interested in replicating their own career trajectories in their graduate students. There’s nothing abnormal or especially wrong about that, but it does lead many job candidates to have expectations about their careers that they will not be able to meet.

One challenge for faculty members at research universities who truly want to help their students find a niche in academe is that those professors generally have little or no experience at institutions other than research universities. They cannot be expected to understand or articulate the real differences between faculty work at their universities and life at small, teaching-oriented colleges, regional public universities, or any other type of institution that is significantly different from the rarified world of the research institution.

There’s a great way to provide assistance and perspective to graduate students who are preparing for faculty careers, however, and one that should be fairly easy to accomplish. Several years ago, a couple of universities invited me to give talks to graduate students about my current small college, and I was happy to do so. In particular, at one session at an Ivy League institution I happened to be visiting for my own research, it was clear that the students were thirsting for a clear picture of what life was like at a reasonably good small liberal-arts college.

I enjoyed those sessions very much, and accept invitations to speak on such topics as often as I can. One institution where I met graduate students several times had an outstanding placement record across institutional types, and one of the reasons it did, I am sure, is that its faculty members went a little extra distance to help their students understand the job market clearly.

I suspect that most academics at small liberal-arts colleges, two-year colleges, regional universities, or other types of institutions people would be delighted to talk about their work with graduate students at research universities — an exchange that would be beneficial to all. It’s not much work to organize such exchanges, really, and they are fun and interesting.

So how can we develop and encourage the kinds of collaborations between institutions that would help graduate students succeed on the market?