That’s a bold claim. We stand behind it. And we think most people in higher education, if they’re being honest with themselves, know it’s true.

Every institution is under pressure to deliver career outcomes and a return on the investment that students make in their education. Experiential learning requirements. Mandatory internships. New majors mapped to workforce demand. Curriculum overhauls. While leadership teams evaluate the next big initiative, most are overlooking the asset with the greatest potential to improve outcomes and ROI at scale – the office staffed by the only people on campus who actually sit at the intersection of education and employment. 

For decades, students, parents, college counselors, and institutions have organized their decision-making around college rankings, brand, and prestige. But, over the past few years, in particular, the decision making criteria has changed, and is now overwhelmingly tied to one metric: ROI. And while brand and prestige matter, students who make the most of career services are far more likely to graduate, land well-paying jobs, and build rewarding careers they’re proud of. Thus, schools that invest in strategic career services engagement are far more likely to deliver on the outcomes and ROI that current and prospective students expect. The answer to higher ed’s biggest problem is literally that simple. 

The schools that deliver the best ROI are those with leadership that not only understand the importance of career services, but understand how to leverage career services on their campus to impact student outcomes.

The data confirms what practitioners already know. Institutions that prioritize scalable career services engagement consistently outperform peer institutions on the metrics that matter most: graduation rates, first-destination outcomes, and earnings. Not marginally, but substantially. The gap between institutions that make career services a strategic priority and those that treat it as a support function is, in many cases, the gap between an institution with graduates who are thriving and one where outcomes are left to chance. 

My argument is not simply that career services is a strategic imperative, it’s that it’s clear that the higher education sector has not yet absorbed what that means and how to effectively mobilize career services to deliver better outcomes and ROI. As a result, while campus leadership searches for creative solutions, the most logical, sustainable (and, frankly, affordable) solution is right under their noses, waiting to be resourced.

Section 2

Before we can talk about what better engagement produces, we have to confront the scale of what’s missing. About 30% of all enrolled students who responded to the 2023 Student Voice Survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse never engaged with career services. Not once. They navigated 4+ years of college without meeting with a career advisor, networking with alumni, attending a career event, or participating in mock interviews. And roughly half of enrolled students visited only once or not at all.

As a result, more than half of bachelor’s degree holders are underemployed a year after graduation, working in jobs that do not require a degree. A decade later, 45% are still underemployed. And individuals who start out underemployed are 3.5 times more likely to remain so ten years later, compared to those who land a college-level job from the start. (Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Burning Glass Institute, Talent Disrupted, 2024.)

The first job is not just a starting point. It sets the trajectory.

The frustrating part is that the bar for avoiding this trajectory isn’t particularly high. Students are leaving college to compete for entry-level jobs. Employer expectations for new college grads they hire are modest. The reality is that they will learn most of what they need to perform on the job.

From a practical perspective, entry-level candidate success boils down to a few things:

1. A clear vision and internal motivation, which typically comes down to whether they are pursuing opportunities that meet their personal interests
2. A compelling personal pitch, to support outreach to alumni, referral sources, and prospective employers
3. Preparedness and confidence to nail the interview process

With a little dedicated time and commitment, the vast majority of college students are capable of competing for entry-level jobs. Success doesn’t require some radical transformation of curriculum, or the college experience, but it does require proper exposure to career pathway information and access to resources that help to ensure they are ready to navigate their transition from college to career. 

Career services provide exactly that for students. For example, a student who participates in mock interviews hosted by their career office is dramatically more prepared to get an entry-level job than one who doesn’t. Not because they learned something abstract, but because interview preparation is just one example of a career service offering that has a disproportionate impact on students’ likelihood to realize success post graduation. Yes, more so than a student’s major, the classes they take, or even their grades.

Half of all students never meaningfully engage with career services. More than half of all graduates end up underemployed. Institutions that close the first number are the ones that close the second.

This adequately describes the very real, but commonly overlooked, performance gap in higher education. Unfortunately, most career teams lack the proper tooling and technology to close it. Despite what seems like an obvious area to invest in – especially in this ROI-driven higher ed climate – most career offices are underfunded and underresourced. 

Here’s some data to crystalize this point:

• 65% of career offices have less than $100K of non-personnel annual budget
• 44% have less than $50K of non-personnel annual budget 
• 55% of career leaders cite being under resourced in staff capacity as one of the biggest challenges they face in their ability to scale their strategic impact
• 42% say not having enough budget is one of their biggest challenges

Source: 2025 Career Services Strategic Needs Survey by uConnect

These numbers have, in part, led to a decline in the number of vendors serving the career office, and a dearth of innovation in the career services field. From a technology perspective, most career teams offer a variety of high-impact point solutions – like job boards, mentor platforms, assessments – designed to support students at different points in their career development process. And while career teams offer a range of resources for their students, most lack the tooling and technology to measure and grow engagement with the resources, programming, and opportunities they offer.

They implement resources, design events, bring employers to campus and are often left with empty rooms, unused resources, and disappointed employer partners. Not because career teams aren’t capable, but because making the most out of a $78,000 technology budget every year gets exhausting. 

As a result, career resources that could otherwise be transformational for students are often presented as a hodgepodge of fragmented and disconnected tools, resulting in limited awareness and utilization from students and very little data to inform career teams about engagement strategies and interventions. On most campuses, these resources are unintentionally hidden from even the faculty and staff that students engage with every day.

For comparison, on the academic side, all critical resources are nicely packaged and curated for students inside a single Learning Management System (LMS). And, to support degree completion, academic leadership has access to all kinds of data related to course completion and degree progress. Most institutions have even implemented some version of an ‘Early Alert’ system that brings together enrollment and completion data for every student, comparing their progress to the ideal state, and nudging both administrators and students themselves when they are off track. 

When it comes to the data, the biggest challenge isn’t what career teams can see…it’s what they can’t. The typical career office can probably tell you which 200 students attended last month’s career fair. What no career office has is the full picture of student engagement data, in one place, so they can see the gap: which seniors have never attended any event, accessed any resource, or connected with any employer across any platform. Engagement leaves traces in dozens of disconnected systems; disengagement leaves no trace anywhere. The students most in need of intervention are, by definition, the least visible. 

A senior who has never engaged with career services in any meaningful way doesn’t show up as a priority in any system. They show up as a statistic in a graduation report years later, a student whose outcome reflects what might have been different with earlier support. If the definition of student success has shifted from degree completion to career outcomes, and the strongest indicator of outcomes is career readiness, then higher ed is in desperate need of a new Early Alerts system – one that measures career services engagement and participation.

Section 3

The ability to effectively track student engagement with career services opens up an even bigger door. Once schools can see what students are engaging with which resources, they can begin asking the question that career services has never been able to answer: what kind of engagement leads to better outcomes, for which students?

Most career teams have been collecting First-Destination Survey data from students for years. Many even report their results to organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to inform national standards and reporting. Unfortunately, once reported, the results typically sit stale in some forgotten spreadsheet, generating very little, if any, ongoing intelligence. The data may get cited in an annual report or be a source for soundbites in an admissions pitch but, beyond that, this precious data set is largely overlooked and underutilized across higher education. 

And this is where the opportunity becomes genuinely transformational. The convergence of engagement data and outcomes data creates something that has never existed before: a foundation for a guidance system that can tell a student not just what resources exist, but which ones are most likely to lead to the outcome they want – importantly, rooted in what’s actually worked at their institution.

Engagement that isn’t informed is engagement that under-delivers. The question isn’t only whether students are showing up. It’s whether what they’re receiving when they do is actually useful.

Thanks to the availability of new AI capabilities, colleges and universities can not only optimize the collection of this data but transform it into insights that can be operationalized to actually inform strategic planning and student pathways directly. 

Implemented the right way, a third-year economics major wondering what careers might be relevant to them, at midnight on Tuesday, doesn’t need to rely on generic internet searches, or wait until the next day to schedule an advising appointment that maybe happens days later. With AI, they can use natural language prompts to ask their school’s always-available career services agent to get real data and curated recommendations grounded in the outcomes of alumni and recent graduates who came before them.  

This is what we are building at uConnect.

The first ever all-in-one Virtual Career Center serves as the digital home for career services and the front door to this intelligence layer that combines student attributes and institutional data, alongside real-time labor market insights. Students no longer aimlessly click through static websites, only to be asked to register and create a profile for one tool after another. They share their interests, curiosities, and goals in their own words, and get curated information and recommendations in response, drawn from the full range of career resources, events, and opportunities their school already offers, and filtered through employment data that reflects the constantly evolving job market. An experience far superior to generic results from internet searches and even ChatGPT prompts. It’s personalized career engagement, rooted in both what has worked in the past and where there is opportunity going forward. 

The experience is truly distinct but the availability transforms access for students, and changes the math for career teams, too. Every career office lives with the same impossible ratio, a handful of staff members responsible for supporting thousands of students, most of whom will never book an appointment or walk into the career office.

AI enables personalized engagement – at scale – by providing every student with instant, on-demand responses to their questions and curiosities, grounded in the institution’s own data and resources, so staff time goes where human judgment really matters, like career coaching, building new employer relationships, and reaching the students their data says need them most. The best part is that the AI gets smarter, and the student experience gets better, with every interaction, every cohort, and every year of accumulated data. Even if the career staff or budget isn’t growing, their reach and impact still does. 

Section 4

The institutions boasting the strongest outcomes and ROI share a common characteristic: they have made career services structurally central to the student experience, not siloed in one office that students visit only when they’re panicking about graduation. It’s embedded across academics, student success, enrollment, and alumni relations.

Career services at these institutions isn’t a service department. It’s an intelligence hub. The data it generates, about which resources students are using, which employer relationships are most valuable, and which engagement patterns predict outcomes, informs decisions across the institution. Faculty learn about labor market trends from career services because they are the ones speaking with campus recruiters every day, conducting on-site visits with top hiring companies, and tracking where employer demand is trending. Advisors recommend specific resources because engagement data from career services shows which ones lead to better outcomes. Presidents and provosts can speak with confidence about student ROI because career services surfaces more than just a First-Destination Survey report but critical elements to the institution’s strategic narrative, rooted in the actual outcomes of real students on their campus.  

The best version of this model is already emerging.

Across higher education, institutions are consolidating disparate data sources to build AI tooling and support AI implementations, and career services is exactly where that motion pays off fastest. The question isn’t whether it’s worth collecting the data but what systems to send it to first because every cohort of outcomes data, every year of accumulated engagement, builds intelligence that has the real potential to guide all students towards better, more rewarding outcomes after graduation. That compounding effect is already being implemented by institutions across higher ed and those who start early will reap the greatest benefits long term. 

And with AI at everyone’s fingertips, this infrastructure is available to more than just the well-resourced research universities. Medium public institutions – operating with constrained budgets and daunting student-to-staff ratios – have already started implementing this. In fact, medium-sized institutions who have done so are already delivering 37% more students above meaningful earnings thresholds than peer institutions that haven’t made this investment. 

The same pattern holds across different geographies, institution types, and student populations. The common denominator, consistent across all institutions that outperform their peers on outcomes, is that they’ve made a sustained, systematic commitment to scaling career engagement and building the infrastructure to measure it. 

While higher education has a reputation for slower adoption of technology, now isn’t the time to take a ‘wait and see’ approach. The pace of AI innovation combined with the growing pressures on higher ed institutions means the development of this critical infrastructure will soon be table stakes for every institution to deliver ROI. And, while the availability and access to AI technology has increased tremendously, making this effort an affordable one for nearly any size institutions, the question will not be whether institutions can afford to do it, but whether they can afford not to.

Section 5

Higher education is at an inflection point. The pressure to demonstrate student outcomes is not a temporary policy trend. It is a structural shift in how institutions are evaluated, funded, and chosen.

We’re beyond asking whether career services will become central to how institutions prove their value. It will. The question is whether institutions will build that capability proactively or scramble to catch up once the gap has become visible, and their peers are years ahead.

The institutions that move now, that commit to making career engagement measurable, that connect their outcomes data to a live intelligence layer, that give career teams the visibility to act on individual student behavior rather than aggregate guesswork, are the ones building an advantage that will compound over time. Every year of accumulated data makes the guidance smarter. Every cohort tracked builds a richer picture of what works. Every student who gets an informed recommendation instead of a generic one is a student more likely to realize their ROI.  

The career services leaders who seize this moment are repositioning their function as the most strategically important office on campus, no longer hiding in plain sight, but recognized for what it is: the only office on campus with the data that can show what drives outcomes, and the ability to systematically improve them. That is a different kind of career services than most institutions have built. It is the kind that thrives under accountability, because it can prove its value rather than assert it.