New on the Job: Q&A With Damon Yarnell, University of Richmond

Student success to Damon Yarnell is all about choice. Yarnell, the University of Richmond’s recently appointed associate provost and executive director for career development, believes students should have agency to identify what makes them happy and their goals at graduation.

University of Richmond

“My job is to help students connect with opportunity and launch, if launch is what they want to do,” Yarnell said.

Yarnell started in this inaugural role at the University of Richmond on Aug. 1, 2024, after previously working as dean of student and global advancement at Colby College in Maine and associate provost at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Yarnell spoke with Course Strat about his position; how he engages faculty, students and employers in career development work; and future data-driven goals for his office.

Q: What led you to a career in higher education?

A: It’s a natural fit for me. I am fascinated by knowledge production and knowledge producers, and I’m fascinated by value production and value producers.

What led me to a career in higher education is that intersection of producing knowledge and learning and then producing value, and it’s turtles all the way down. So that’s true at different scales for me.

When it comes to knowledge, I’m fascinated by the institutional curriculum and the shape of the curriculum. I’m a student, literally, of disciplines and how they evolved, syllabi and an individual course, a student’s experience of that individual course.

The same is true for value as a student: What value do I derive from education? How does an institution contribute value to its local community, to national partners, to society at large? And when I say value, I want to make sure I emphasize that that’s not only economic value. I’m in career development, and so absolutely economic value is part of the equation, but I take a broader view of value than only economic return.

Q: I’m glad you brought up value, because I think career development in higher ed right now is at an interesting point where, like you mentioned, there is that question about economic mobility for students, or that return on the investment of their degree. When you think about your role and how it fits into the value of higher ed? Where do you see yourself as a piece of the puzzle?

A: I help students launch. That’s what my team does. We help students take the interests and skills and priorities that they develop while they’re in college out into the wider world and position them to earn a return on their experience, including their degree.

Now that return may be economic, but it may not be, or it may be economic, and we might have both-and. With my team, I emphasize that students choose what value means. We at University of Richmond are moving beyond [collecting] only first-destination survey [data], only salary, to make sure that we include in how we assess our contribution graduates’ sense of alignment: Is the work that you’re doing now aligned with your personal interests and priorities? Are you happy in your work?

We are going to keep pushing that finish line out in time so that we know that our graduates continue to derive value and experience choice, not only in their first year, but in their fifth and 10th.

That also means that in a variety of ways, and it’s not either-or. Our graduates are contributing to the greater good, and depending on their own priorities [and] depending on how they define the greater good, some directly because they choose to go into social impact work, others because they are generating opportunity through a more specific and narrow focus on finance. But collectively, Spiders—at the University of Richmond, we’re the Spiders—contribute to the greater social good, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be doing the work.

Q: I met some Richmond students at a conference a few months ago and that was so shocking to learn. I didn’t realize a spider could even be a college mascot.

A: I think we’re the only arachnids. If you work at the University of Richmond, you need to be ready for an onslaught of spider and web puns.

Q: It’s good brand value—you’ll never be confused with any other mascot.

The role you’re in used to be in the advancement office, and now is in a new house in the institution. Can you talk about how your role fits into the institutional vision of student success?

A: We now sit in the provost’s office. My boss is the provost, and she is essentially the dean of the faculty, so we’re in the same division as the faculty. Why is this important? I think it’s a trend, and I think we’re in the vanguard among liberal arts institutions for having made the move.

University of Richmond

Earlier in my career at Dickinson College, I helped lead a similar move. We took career development, in that case, from student life into academic affairs. Nationally, there is a movement to take career development out of its traditional home in student life or student affairs and elsewhere, sometimes advancement, sometimes academic affairs.

We, in order to deliver full value for students, need to integrate across the institution. We need to activate the ecosystem—that’s the jargon—in support of career development. Students don’t care who my boss is. They want a seamless experience, and so we need to work with colleagues across the institution in residence life and student life. We need to help students integrate summer opportunities and access to summer opportunities to their academic studies in the classroom.

The chance to partner with faculty is central to our strategic plan. Student experience is central to the university strategic plan, and it’s definitely part of my role. Students should have a seamless experience.

At a liberal arts institution, the way I understand a student’s choice of classes or a student’s choice of major is as a signal of interest. Especially in a liberal arts institution, major is not destiny, but it matters, and so my team wants to know from students, not just what major did you choose, but why did you choose that major? Why are you enthused about the types of questions, the type of methodologies that exist in in that major? When was the last time you were inspired when you left a classroom, or when was the last time you found yourself thinking about a lecture or reading a day or two later? Let’s dig into that, and let’s help you discover a range of possibilities for you to consider that relate to your answers.

Q: How is your team considering ways to make careers something students experience throughout college, and not just that final semester … senior year?

A: Success in career development rests on engagement, satisfaction and learning, and they have to relate. Satisfaction and learning drive engagement. Students are smart. Students are busy. If they’re not deriving value from their time with us [in career services], they’re not going to come back. So how do we build that virtuous cycle and start early at the University of Richmond?

We’re fortunate, we have a place in the required curriculum through a course called WELL 100, and so we have at least one touch point with just about 100 percent of the incoming class, but then we need to give them reasons to come back.

We do that through a variety of ways, depending on a student’s college, because we’ve got three: Arts and Sciences, Robins Business School and the Jepson School of Leadership. The pathway and the structures may vary, but we deliver really unique programming that aligns with students’ interests along the way.

Then we have a great asset in the Richmond Guarantee, such that every student can have up to $5,000 to support an un- or underpaid research or internship opportunity.

Q: How do you partner with faculty in your work?

A: I’m in my sixth month, and I’m building on the good work of my team and colleagues before my arrival, but we’re accelerating to help faculty identify how they want to connect with career development, and it’s going to be different.

Faculty are creative. They are independent-minded. They don’t tend to respond to directives by fiat, and so we’ll have real variation. But I’ll give you one, maybe two recent examples. We are expanding our field trips—we call them Spider Road Trips—to include not only finance and consulting, but marketing and other creative careers.

We recently led one to New York; members of the faculty from Humanities and Arts joined us, and they’ve asked to go back. President emeritus [Ronald A.] Crutcher, who was a musician, he and his wife joined us; they’ve asked to go back. We recruited students from those majors to go.

Some of those faculty and their friends have started to ask about how else we can work together, and how they can celebrate the many virtues of what they do in their discipline and in the classroom in a way that helps students see possibilities and connections connected to the wider world. A colleague of mine recently worked with an English professor, for example, who included an assignment analyzing a career trajectory of the protagonist of Victorian novel.

Q: How are you building employer relationships?

A: I’m fortunate that I’m joining a team that already has an excellent staff and a robust set of relationships.

One of my priorities in this first year is to make sure that every student—regardless of interest, regardless of identity—has access to quality opportunities. There’s a data-driven dimension to that priority, which is to track our partnerships. How do they sort by industry? Within those industries, what of the opportunities that students have landed? This is really in the weeds, but it’s important, how do those opportunities sort by job function? Because sorted by industry is really incomplete. We have a marketing team here at the University of Richmond. Do they work in marketing or do they work in higher education?

So we need a nuanced data analysis in order to really understand what kinds of connections and opportunities our partners can deliver.

We’re cultivating with an eye toward surfacing the opportunities that have the greatest potential value for our current students, and those are going to vary. We have an excellent accounting program through the business school, and those students tend to have a linear path into accounting. They’re getting hired earlier and earlier, right into the top firms. So what we do to make sure that we’re delivering great opportunities for those students is going to be different from students who choose a path that involves more just-in-time hiring, in which we may have partners who recruit classes of interns but they’re not likely to extend return offers. So students are going to have to follow a different path out of that internship.

That’s what we’re doing, taking a data-driven approach to continued cultivation. And as I said, I’m really fortunate because I’ve got a great team, and the Spider network is fiercely loyal to the institution and ready to pay it forward.

Q: What are some of your short and long-term goals in your new role?

A: Making sure that we deliver access to everyone is top priority, and the Richmond Guarantee and some other programs really help with that. That’s before students graduate—making sure that we deliver equity and access at launch is another priority that we’ve already talked about.

The ease of navigation I’ve addressed in part through the academic program and partnership with faculty, but that extends beyond only partnership with faculty. We need to make the easy things easy so that students can focus on the things that aren’t so easy, like deciding what they want to do with their lives. We’re building a set of modular, integrated resources so that the easy things are really easy, and so that students can find what they need when they need it and then navigate whether their path is linear, like our accounting students’, or less than linear, like our theater and dance students’ or our students who are committed to social impact.

I would say those are among my top priorities, and related to that, second, is getting a rich understanding of career trajectories of our graduates, which is a data-driven project and one that I love, because Spiders have fascinating work lives, and getting the chance to trace them and then talk to them about their careers and look for patterns and how they built their careers, that’s a happy place for me.

Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Robins School of Business.