The University of North Florida has accepted Governor Rick Scott’s challenge to get 100 percent of mass communication and psychology students full-time jobs within the first year of graduation.
Scott’s “Ready, Set, Work” challenge asks universities to ensure all grads in the most popular majors go on to jobs or graduate school.
UNF accepted the challenge Friday morning. VP of Governmental Relations Janet Owen says the state already tracks the number of graduates who gain full-time employment or go on to graduate school.
“You know, our money is wrapped up into how well we do on these metrics,” she said.
Now UNF is committing to jobs for everyone in the school’s top two majors: psychology and mass communication, and Owen acknowledges they aren’t the easiest tracks to immediately find employment — which she suspects is the reason for the governor’s challenge.
Which Owen says is “If that’s where the majority of your students are, let’s make sure that they’re successful. And if it would prove that they’re not, do what you can do to maybe incentivize students who want a career or want to go where there are job opportunities that the universities would focus on the realities of the workplace in the freshman year, before those kinds of decisions are made.”
Owen says for UNF the first step is analyzing the employment-after-graduation numbers from the state and figuring out a plan.
In 2011, the school had 71 percent of graduates employed or in a graduate program within a year. This past semester, that number rose to 81 percent.
