Many college graduates are turning to computer boot camps and other training courses to enhance their résumé skills and employability. Here, a recent class at Dev Bootcamp, a New York City school that teaches students to become web developers in 19 weeks. Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Matt Hudson graduated from University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in May 2013 with a degree in urban studies, but after hunting around fruitlessly for a job in his field, he moved in with his parents in a Chicago suburb and began handing out samples at a grocery store to pay off some $30,000 in student loans.
Instead of heading to graduate school and taking on thousands of more dollars in debt, Mr. Hudson has chosen an increasingly common path for recent graduates facing a tough job market: He enrolled at Harper College, a local community college, to earn a four-month, $800 certificate in computer-aided drawing and now works there in a paid internship.
“I think the bachelor’s degree is actually less than what is believed to be,” said the 25-year-old from Arlington Heights, Ill. “I see the certificate I got as more career-based and has actually provided me more leverage toward my goals.”
Already saddled with debt, students in a variety of majors, but especially within liberal-arts subjects, political science and arts programs, are finding that a bachelor’s degree often provides skills that are too general to land a job. So they are increasingly signing up for coding boot camps, online classes or going to community college. Together the options represent a developing rung in the hierarchy of higher education, modern-day finishing school.
Studies show the long-term value of a college degree in terms of lifetime employment opportunities, but in the short-run many college grads are feeling the frustration of an economy that increasingly demands specialized skills.
“In the end you have to put some kind of applied point on your pencil in order to get through the door,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “These are the handholds and footholds that allow you to move around and start climbing new angles” in the job market.
Recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates—while down from 7% in 2011—remains above historical standards at about 5%. And about 46% of recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t typically require degrees, as compared with about 35% for all college graduates.
A 2013 study from Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-markets analytics company, found that the number of job opportunities for liberal-arts graduates nearly doubled to 1.8 million jobs from 950,000 jobs when they had additional skills, such as marketing, data analysis and computer programming.
Colleges and universities defend a grounding in the liberal arts as a long-term key to success, said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
But more four-year schools are adapting to employers’ expectations by doing things like adding hands-on projects with community groups outside the classroom that will give students real-world problems to chew on. “The more we see institutions making that educational change, the less likely that students will need an after-college boot camp,” she said.
Joyce McKnight-Williams, interim vice chancellor of workforce and economic policy at the Dallas County Community College District, said she is seeing more degree-carrying students taking online classes at community college, especially classes for professional tracks like nursing.
“We’re seeing a lot of people, especially young people, who have come here and said, ‘I really do need work. This is the reality—I’m finding out that I can make three times as much in an applied area or workforce area, than I can in the theoretical area,’ ” Ms. McKnight-Williams said. “It’s about the money.”
With prices ranging from free to $20,000 and lasting one to eight months, coding boot camps are rising in popularity. While boot-camp graduates aren’t guaranteed to find a job, the intensive programs take students with little to no coding experience and provide them with skills for entry-level jobs. Such jobs have an average income of about $76,000, according to boot-camp directory Course Report.
In spring 2014, an industry survey by Course Report of about 40 such boot camps found the number of total graduates jumped to about 6,000 in 2014, up from about 2,200 in 2013. U.S. universities, meanwhile, conferred about 52,000 computer-science bachelor’s degrees in 2013, according to the National Science Foundation.
Some training online, such as with massive open online courses, can provide a low-cost alternative to students who can’t pay for more expensive boot camps. Anant Agarwal, chief executive of MOOC provider edX, sees his online classes, many of which are free, as the final touch for many graduates’ résumés.
Take Anthony Singiser, who discovered that he didn’t speak the language of jobs after graduating from New Jersey’s Rutgers University in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. The best position he could land was as a cook earning $9 an hour, barely enough to keep up with his monthly bill to chip at about $60,000 in student loans.
The 25-year-old, who has since switched to working at Starbucks in Denver, recently enrolled in a free coding class to learn another language, one he believes will deliver more than his college degree.
“I’m trying to be less spiteful about the situation and trying to be more proactive now,” he said. “It’s funny that I’ve majored in English and I find myself illiterate in this day and age of technology.”
Write to Caroline Porter at caroline.porter@wsj.com