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This chapter reports on a course that is designed to facilitate the students’ transition out of college and into life after graduation. It describes how the course foregrounds the problems students face, both the technical aspects of the transition and the emotional experience, unthought out ideas about what the students want, their goals, and how they might go about achieving their goals. The authors report on the course culture, assignments, observations from teaching the course, student feedback from focus groups, surveys, behavior, as well as summaries of data on the student’s experience.

The need for this course is supported by the research literature on emerging adulthood. In addition, the authors report on focus group and survey data gathered. The modern discourse on the post-college transition commonly emphasizes economic and practical hurdles, such as educational loan debt, student employability, skill transferability, career networking, and job interviewing. Receiving far less attention are the psychosocial and developmental dimensions that color the student experience of the graduation transition.

Yet very few colleges and universities have paid attention to this glaring need, especially public institutions with many first-generation college students. This chapter describes a college course dealing with the problem of transitioning to life after college taught in an intellectual, communal, and personal atmosphere.

There are several ways to define words. One is to ascertain the formal definition by looking it up in the dictionary. Another is to identify what it is that you want the word-label to differentiate.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.