Not Just the First Job

Michael Bitzer went to a small liberal arts institution for his own undergraduate education and felt the difference it made. He knew if he could replicate even a fraction of what his professors had done for him, he would call his career a success. At Catawba, he found exactly the environment that philosophy required, small enough to know every student, demanding enough to push them beyond their comfort zones, and committed enough to the long view that no one was optimizing for the wrong outcomes. He doesn't measure success by where students land their first job. He measures it by the emails he gets five and ten and fifteen years later.

The Confidence to Handle the Rigors

The emails always say something similar. They come from the first semester of law school, usually. They say thank you for pushing them when they needed it, because now they can handle the rigors, and they are just as prepared as, if not better prepared than, their classmates from much larger institutions. The pattern tracks with what Bitzer sees again and again: students who arrive with the intellectual capability but not yet the self-confidence, and who leave with both. Jason Windett arrived as one of Bitzer's first full graduating classes, bound for law school. By his junior year, he knocked on Bitzer's door and said he wanted to do what Bitzer did. He went on to earn a PhD in political science, taught at Saint Louis University, and is now a full professor and Director of Research at UNC Charlotte's School of Data Science.

Building the Middle Class

Bitzer frames the work at Catawba in terms that go beyond individual career outcomes. He studies U.S. politics and history, and what he sees in Catawba's student body, heavily first-generation, crossing socioeconomic lines, is a machine for building the middle class. A college education gives students the capabilities and adaptability to navigate an economy that is shifting faster than anyone can predict. The confidence-building, the embedded values, the ability to think across disciplines and repackage arguments, these are the things that position students not just for the job in front of them, but for the ones that don't exist yet.

Beyond the Major

Bitzer is deliberate about interdisciplinary engagement. He tells students their career will take them in directions they cannot predict, and that the skills they are building, communication, critical thinking, analytical problem-solving, listening to the other side, will serve them in any field. Ryan Dayvault came in with strong partisan views. By the time he was in an upper-level economics class, a classmate turned to him after he walked through both sides of an argument and said, "You've been hanging around Bitzer too long, Ryan." Dayvault now serves on the Kannapolis City Council and works at the North Carolina Research Campus. That, Bitzer says, is what happens when you teach people to think rather than just agree.

Preparing for Jobs That Don't Exist Yet

He gives students a metaphor: the career ladder. Every rung you climb sets you up for a direction you didn't see coming. One of his students is now the city administrator for York, South Carolina, and working on his Doctorate in Public Administration, a path he couldn't have mapped from his first-year seminar, but one that made perfect sense at every step. That's the kind of preparation Bitzer is after. Not the résumé that gets you through the first door, but the foundation that helps you build the whole house.