Three weeks ago my cousin and uncle from Chicago came to visit my fam­ily in Los Ange­les. Yet, this was no ordi­nary, visit. They were on a mis­sion to check out five South­ern Cal­i­for­nia col­leges in five days. That's doable, I thought to myself.

Each night, I would ask my cousin what he thought about the school he vis­ited that day. During one con­ver­sa­tion, he shared that his tour guide opened up the tour by stat­ing that there are "dream­ers and doers" and that on this par­tic­u­lar cam­pus, stu­dents who iden­ti­fied them­selves as "doers" thrived. The next night, he shared how the tour guide began his tour by boast­ing to all prospec­tive stu­dents that last year's senior class entered jobs where the aver­age start­ing salary was around $70K. While I am unsure if my cousin has any remote idea what he see him­self doing five years from now, his obser­va­tions made me won­der how schools are pitch­ing the prospects of employ­ment after grad­u­a­tion dur­ing stu­dent led tours.

If you think about it, it's not sur­pris­ing that col­leges are plac­ing a greater empha­sis on their abil­ity to attract large cor­po­ra­tions for recruit­ing pur­poses. With unem­ploy­ment hov­er­ing around 9.5% nation­ally, it's under­stand­able for col­leges to self­ishly dis­tin­guish them­selves by high­light­ing the large com­pa­nies who recruit at their schools and the corporate-sponsored research oppor­tu­ni­ties and intern­ships made avail­able for their students.

Evi­dence for this grow­ing trend can be found can be found in a recently pub­lished Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle, where results from a recent sur­vey showed that research agree­ments between large uni­ver­si­ties and the cor­po­rate world play a large role in set­ting up under­grads for future employ­ment posi­tions. Specif­i­cally, schools such as the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan and Carnegie Mel­lon have forged research part­ner­ships with large for­tune 500 com­pa­nies includ­ing Google Inc. and Bar­racuda Net­works, who have set up offices just out­side of Ann Arbor and Pitts­burgh respec­tively. Sweet deal for stu­dents, right?

Not nec­es­sar­ily, accord­ing to Jen­nifer Wash­burn, author of Uni­ver­sity, Inc.: The Cor­po­rate Cor­rup­tion of Higher Edu­ca­tion. While most stu­dents would be thrilled to tran­si­tion from their corporate-sponsored research posi­tion to a full-time posi­tion within the cor­po­ra­tion itself, these same stu­dents should real­ize that because these large orga­ni­za­tions are foot­ing the bill for their research dur­ing their under­grad­u­ate years, this could, "hijack that inde­pen­dence and com­mit­ment to free and broad intel­lec­tual inquiry," she says. In other words, even a fully spon­sored research grant has its bound­aries which may or may not com­pro­mise the goals of stu­dent led research.

So, while con­duct­ing your col­lege research dur­ing on cam­pus tours, take the time to ask your tour guide about intern­ship, research, and job-recruitment events on cam­pus. These oppor­tu­ni­ties may set you up for a won­der­ful and reward­ing job or intern­ship down the road. Now that's some for­ward thinking.