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Graduate employability study finds career-connected learning and real-world experience are priorities for college graduates

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Peer-reviewed article by University of Phoenix scholars identifies curriculum-career alignment, critical thinking, and experiential learning and mentorship as strategies graduates associate with career readiness.

PHOENIX, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies scholars affiliated with the Center for Educational and Instructional Technology Research (CEITR) have published a peer-reviewed study examining how higher education institutions can support graduate employability as workplace skill demands continue to change.

Published in the International Journal of Innovative Business Strategies, as the article, “Graduate Employability in a Changing World,” the mixed-methods study draws on the perspectives of 380 graduates of U.S. colleges and universities and found strong agreement that employability is supported when academic learning is intentionally connected to careers, practical applications and opportunities to develop adaptable skills.

Among 11 employability strategies evaluated by respondents, connecting curriculum to careers received the highest rating, followed by teaching critical thinking and adaptability, incorporating real-world applications and encouraging internships or employment. The researchers found that graduates especially associated employability development with practices delivered through faculty instruction, advising and mentoring.

“Our findings suggest graduates value career relevance when it is built throughout the educational experience,” said Rheanna Reed, DM, lead author and research fellow in the Center for Educational and Instructional Technology Research (CEITR) at University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies. “Connecting learning to careers, creating opportunities to apply knowledge and helping learners develop adaptability can make career readiness a more intentional part of higher education.”

Graduates emphasize experiential learning and practical skill development

Open-ended responses reinforced the quantitative findings. Among 306 graduates responding to a question about employability best practices, experiential learning was the most frequently cited strategy, appearing in 77 responses. Other frequently identified practices included skill development, mentorship and networking, and curriculum-career alignment.

The study also identified barriers that may make employability opportunities harder to access. Among 292 respondents answering a question about challenges, time constraints and competing responsibilities were cited most frequently. Labor market and financial constraints were also identified.

The researchers conclude that higher education institutions can support employability by integrating career relevance across curricula, expanding access to experiential learning, strengthening mentoring and networking opportunities, and encouraging self-directed learning and continuous skill development.

The authors note that the study reflects graduates’ self-reported perceptions and does not directly measure the effectiveness of particular institutional practices or establish causal relationships. Its cross-sectional design and panel-based sample also limit the extent to which findings can be generalized.

The authors previously presented study findings in a session titled, “Graduate career readiness and employability: Global issues in education and research,” at the London International Conference on Education, November 3-5, 2025, and at the University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies’ Knowledge Without Boundaries Summit in October 2025.

About the authors

The authors are affiliates of the Center for Educational and Instructional Technology Research (CEITR), housed within the University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies, which supports scholarly research and collaboration on topics related to teaching and learning, online and in-person education, educational technology strategies, and educational policies, practices and theories.

Rheanna Reed, DM, is a research fellow with the CEITR and serves as Faculty Quality Assurance Manager at the University. She has worked in higher education since 2006 and conducts research focused on instructional quality, faculty support, student success and graduate employability. She earned her Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership from University of Phoenix.

Louise Underdahl, Ph.D. is a doctoral instructor in the University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies and a research fellow with CEITR. Her scholarship examines graduate employability, career development, mentorship, worker autonomy and human-AI collaboration. Underdahl has taught at University of Phoenix since 2004 and earned her doctorate from the University of Southern California.

Nicole Gulley, Ed.D., is a University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies alumna affiliated with CEITR. Her research interests include student retention and graduate employability, and she has contributed to University research examining nontraditional online student retention as well as employer needs, graduate skills and curriculum design.

Shawishi Haynes, Ph.D., Ed.D., serves as a University Research Methodologist in the University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies and is affiliated with CEITR. Haynes has more than 30 years of healthcare leadership experience and has been faculty at University of Phoenix since 2008, serving in multiple academic and leadership capacities. Her research interests include graduate employability, student retention, healthcare workforce challenges, and alignment between academic preparation and evolving workforce needs.

Mar Navarro, Ph.D., is a University Research Methodologist in the University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies and a CEITR research fellow. Her research focuses on cognition and cognitive ergonomics, including how people learn, understand and process information, with particular interests in online teaching and learning, student retention and graduate employability.

The full article, “Graduate Employability in a Changing World,” is available in the International Journal of Innovative Business Strategies, 11(1), at https://infonomics-society.org/ijibs/published-papers/volume-11-2025/.

About the College of Doctoral Studies

University of Phoenix’s College of Doctoral Studies focuses on today’s challenging business and organizational needs, from addressing critical social issues to developing solutions to accelerate community building and industry growth. The College’s research program is built around the Scholar, Practitioner, Leader Model which puts students in the center of the Doctoral Education Ecosystem® with experts, resources and tools to help prepare them to be a leader in their organization, industry and community. Through this program, students and researchers work with organizations to conduct research that can be applied in the workplace in real time.

About University of Phoenix 

University of Phoenix is Built for Real Life. 50 Years Strong. The University innovates to help working adults enhance their careers and develop skills in a rapidly changing world through flexible online learning, relevant courses, academic AI pillars, and skills-mapped curriculum for associate, bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. Active students and alumni have access to Career Services for Life® resources including career guidance and tools. For more information, visit phoenix.edu.

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SOURCE University of Phoenix

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Arcjet Launches Agent Runtime Security for Production AI Agents

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New product helps teams discover agent activity, apply controls before and after consequential actions, and preserve evidence for security reviews and compliance

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Arcjet, the security platform that ships in your AI code, today launched agent runtime security, a new product that helps engineering teams secure the AI agents they are building while giving security teams the governance and compliance evidence they need. Arcjet brings observability, enforcement, and audit capabilities across agent workflows so teams can discover which agents are running, control what they can do, and understand what happened and why.

AI agents are moving beyond chat interfaces and into production workflows, where they can read and write to databases, respond to support tickets, refund payments, call tools and APIs, and take other actions on behalf of users. Those workflows can start from a chat interface, an email, a text message, a code commit, or another event, and can continue autonomously across multiple systems.

As agents take on longer-running workflows, security teams need to answer three questions across the full sequence of activity, which agents are running, whether a particular action should be allowed, and what happened and why.

Arcjet’s agent runtime security addresses those questions through observe, enforce, and audit capabilities. Teams can discover agent activity and connect actions across sessions, apply deterministic security policies before and after calls to LLMs, tools, databases, and APIs, and preserve the execution context needed for security reviews and compliance.

“Agents are now taking real actions inside production systems, which means security teams need to know which agents are operating and what they have done, and apply controls at machine speed,” said David Mytton, CEO at Arcjet. “A risky outcome can develop across a series of steps that look perfectly reasonable on their own. Arcjet connects those steps and gives teams policy controls to detect them.”

Arcjet’s agent runtime security centers on three parts of securing agents in production, observe, enforce, and audit.

Observe: Discover all your agents

Arcjet supports ingesting agent activity without application code changes or deploying another agent. Platform and security teams can use existing OpenTelemetry observability tooling to send activity directly to Arcjet for real-time visualization and analysis. For teams using Claude, Arcjet can also pull activity from the Claude Compliance API.

Arcjet connects activity across sessions so teams can see an agent’s sequence of actions as one workflow rather than a collection of unrelated events. Activity can include prompts, tool call parameters, session metadata, identity, security decisions, and other application context, giving teams a view of what each agent is doing across a run.

Agent identity and inventory are part of that visibility. Arcjet gives teams an inventory of the agents and applications operating inside their environment, with activity and individual runs associated with each agent so teams can inspect actions and security decisions step by step.

Enforce: Apply controls before and after every action

Once teams can see their agents and activity across sessions, Arcjet lets security teams define controls for prompt injection detection, PII and sensitive information leak prevention and redaction, automation and bot detection, rate limits, and quota controls. Arcjet guards apply deterministic policies to tools, APIs, database calls, and other inputs and outputs. Powered by Rego and Open Policy Agent, teams can create versioned, immutable policies through Arcjet’s web UI, API, CLI, or MCP without redeploying application code.

Policies can define the actions an agent is allowed to take, such as restricting recipients or attachments in an email tool, setting acceptable bounds for refund values, or limiting web fetch tools to trusted API URLs. Arcjet returns a decision to the application before the action executes, allowing the application to stop the operation, request human approval, or return an explanation to the agent. Applied before and after calls to LLMs, tools, databases, and APIs, these controls can mitigate risk before consequential actions and verify results before the workflow continues.

For enforcement, Arcjet has native integrations with major agent frameworks, including Claude Agents SDK, Claude Managed Agents, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain, LangFuse, Strands, Mastra, and Microsoft’s Agent Framework. This in-code context allows Arcjet to track recorded actions, their inputs, and policy decisions across the workflow.

Audit: Evidence and proof of compliance

Arcjet collects the context of each execution so teams can reconstruct what happened, understand why a policy decision was made, and provide evidence for security reviews and compliance audits. Correlated traces preserve actions, inputs, security decisions, and policy evaluations across the work

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arcjet-launches-agent-runtime-security-for-production-ai-agents-302882668.html

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The live music industry still largely runs on spreadsheets and email threads. ABOSS is the operating system.

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AMSTERDAM, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Let’s be honest. The live music industry still runs its operations across email threads and spreadsheets at large. Booking agencies, artists, managers and crews coordinate deals, contracts, logistics, and money through systems that were never designed to connect.

ABOSS spent the past decade building an operating system for live music, to solve this problem from a place of deep industry experience. Booking agencies, artists, and crews can manage their shows in one structured environment; from the back-office to center-stage. However, while the hustle is real and the front-end often catches the spotlight, the adoption of new technology in the back-end can move like a slow jam on a Sunday afternoon.

“After all those years, deals are still made on relationships, and they’re still being executed in chaos,” said Arvid Silos, founder of ABOSS. “If your data lives in inboxes and spreadsheets, you’re leaving margins on the table.”

ABOSS is built with structured collaboration, dealmaking and business logistics in mind across two environments on the same record. The Agency Platform is where booking agencies run deals, contracts, financial tracking, planning, and pre-production. Artist Pro is where artists and their teams access, review, and work on the same data. A true single source of truth solution.

That split is also the platform’s position on who owns the data. Operational information in live music has long sat with the agency, or been scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets. Agencies running on ABOSS are already offering artists a record they can own, access and control, while the agency continues to run the operation. The infrastructure has been there for a decade. However, hardly any artist or manager claims it: of the roughly $1 billion in deal value moving through ABOSS this year, artist-owned records cover about 4%.

A mobile application extends that record onto the road: schedules, travel, and ops, available offline, with summaries. Records are exposed through an open API to empower a new layer of specialized workflows and integrations to improve the live music stack.

SAPPS AI, offering platform-agnostic AI-native micro-apps for live music, is one of those layers that recognizes the power of ABOSS as a system of data supply. AI Models need data that is substantial, owned, structured, secure, and current, contextualized to specific business cases. AI does not replace architecture. That’s where ABOSS turns admin into a commercial opportunity in the age of AI.

It’s one thing to jump on the AI hypetrain, it’s another thing to diligently navigate it, nurturing trust and strongholding this promise ABOSS built the operating system for live music on; to elevate the way we all work in music.

About ABOSS: ABOSS is the operating system for live music. Booking agencies, artists, managers and crews use it to collaboratively manage deals, contracts, finances, logistics and more in a shared environment. https://abossmusic.com

About SAPPS: SAPPS is a platform-agnostic AI-native intelligence layer for the live music industry: specialized applications that connect across systems music businesses already run. https://sapps.ai

Representative: Arvid Silos
Contact: press@a-boss.net
Address: Amsterdam, NH, The Netherlands

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Rasmussen University to Celebrate Approximately 6,200 Graduates at its Minnesota Commencement Ceremony

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Graduates from 32 states and Washington, D.C., to gather in St. Paul for Rasmussen University’s final 2026 commencement celebration

ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Rasmussen University part of American Public University System (Rasmussen) will celebrate the achievements of nearly 6,200 graduates during its 2026 Minnesota Commencement Ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 19, at 11 a.m. at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul, MN, as well as online. The graduates completed their programs during the past year, representing the Classes of 2025 and 2026.

The Minnesota ceremony marks the third and final commencement celebration for Rasmussen University in 2026, following ceremonies in Illinois in April and Florida in June. Graduates have completed programs across eight areas of study, including nursing, health sciences, business, education, human services, justice studies, design and technology, offered at 20 Rasmussen campuses and online.

“Rasmussen University has a proud tradition of preparing students for careers that strengthen our communities and make a meaningful difference in the lives of others,” said Angela Selden, chancellor of American Public University System. “As part of American Public University System, Rasmussen University advances our shared mission to empower students through education to transform lives, advance careers, and serve their communities.”

Graduates registered to attend the ceremony in person represent 32 states and Washington, D.C., reflecting the national reach of Rasmussen University and its commitment to accessible, career-focused education. Nearly 20% are earning their second or additional degree from Rasmussen, highlighting Rasmussen’s commitment to lifelong learning and supporting students as they continue to advance their education and careers.

“Throughout our three commencement celebrations this year, we’ve had the privilege of hearing countless stories of resilience and purpose,” said Dr. Carrie Daninhirsch, provost at Rasmussen University. “In Illinois, Nursing graduate Beatrice Agbayewa pursued a career she loves after being inspired by a friend, persevering through health challenges along the way. In Florida, Human Services graduate and Navy veteran Brian Lange turned his own challenges finding his path after military service into a passion for helping other veterans rebuild their lives. As we gather here in St. Paul, where Rasmussen was founded more than 125 years ago, it’s especially meaningful to celebrate our final graduating class of 2026 and the next generation of graduates who will carry that legacy forward.”

Commencement Speakers

The ceremony will feature remarks from distinguished leaders and members of the Rasmussen University community who will share messages of perseverance, purpose and lifelong learning with the graduating class.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Cyrus Batheja

Dr. Cyrus Batheja, president and chief executive officer of Ecumen, will deliver the keynote address. Ecumen is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing innovative housing, healthcare and community-based services for older adults.

Batheja’s own educational journey was inspired by his mother, an immigrant who pursued nursing school while raising her family. Her determination shaped his path into nursing and healthcare leadership. In his keynote, he will reflect on the perseverance behind graduates’ achievements and encourage them to stay rooted in purpose, create opportunities for others and define success by how they live and serve their communities.

Prior to joining Ecumen, Batheja held senior leadership positions with UnitedHealthcare and Optum, including serving as national vice president of nursing at OptumRx, where he led more than 1,500 nurses delivering critical therapies across the United States. He is also co-founder of Batheja Supportive Living Services, serves on the Board of Regents at Augsburg University and was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2022.

Graduate Speaker: Tykeishah Todd

Tykeishah Todd, a September 2026 Master of Healthcare Administration graduate, will represent the graduating class as its graduate speaker. A dedicated healthcare professional and mother of two, Todd is also a returning Rasmussen University graduate, having earned her Human Services degree from Rasmussen in 2022.

Throughout her Rasmussen journey, Todd has balanced her education, career and family responsibilities while continuing to pursue her professional goals. She currently serves as a supervisor in family medicine, where she leads with a passion for supporting her team and improving the patient experience. While pursuing her master’s degree, she also earned two career promotions.

Todd’s journey reflects the resilience and perseverance of Rasmussen graduates. In her Commencement message, she will encourage graduates to give themselves grace, embrace their individual journeys and remember that setbacks do not define their potential. She will share how earning her degree represents healing, growth and rewriting her story.

Alumni Speaker: Kimberley Wilde

Kimberley Wilde, a 2022 Rasmussen University graduate, will return to the Commencement stage as the alumni speaker and help lead Rasmussen’s Alumni Pinning Ceremony.

Wilde earned her Bachelor of Science in Business Management online from Rasmussen University after previously earning her Associate of Science degree from Rasmussen. She currently serves as a senior business analyst at Mayo Clinic.

As a first-generation college graduate, Wilde returned to school as an adult learner while balancing a full-time career and raising her two daughters. For Wilde, earning her degree represented not only a personal accomplishment, but also an opportunity to demonstrate to her daughters the importance of education and that it is never too late to pursue a goal.

During her own Commencement celebration in 2022, Wilde was selected to represent her class as the graduate speaker. She now returns as a proud alum to welcome the newest graduates into Rasmussen University’s lifelong alumni community.

The Alumni Pinning Ceremony is a special Rasmussen University tradition symbolizing graduates’ transition from students to alumni and their entry into a community that will remain connected long after Commencement.

To learn more about Rasmussen University’s 2026 commencement ceremonies, visit:
Rasmussen University Commencement Information

About Rasmussen University:
Rasmussen University part of American Public University System (Rasmussen), combines a rich history of educational excellence with the strength of a system dedicated to preparing students for service-oriented careers. The System is committed to enriching communities by delivering innovative, career-focused education and maintaining a longstanding commitment to preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals. The System offers undergraduate and graduate programs online and across 20 Rasmussen campuses nationwide in eight areas of study, including nursing, health sciences, business, technology, and social services. Since 1900, Rasmussen has been creating opportunities, transforming lives, and strengthening communities through student-centered education that prepares graduates for in-demand careers. Learn more at www.Rasmussen.edu.

About American Public University System:
American Public University System (the System), provides postsecondary education that transforms lives, advances careers, and improves communities. With over 109,000 students and 250,000 alumni worldwide, the System includes American Military University (AMU), American Public University (APU), Rasmussen University, and Hondros College of Nursing

The System is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) (www.hlcommission.org), an institutional accreditation agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Public Education, Inc. (Nasdaq: APEI).

Contact: Molly Andersen
Mobile: 903.920.4366
Email: molly.andersen@rasmussen.edu

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SOURCE Rasmussen University

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