Go look at the website of any college on your list. I'll wait.
You found the phrase "career outcomes" within the first few minutes, didn't you? Maybe even "return on investment." Possibly a smiling graduate in business attire or a lab coat, gainfully employed and loving it. Career success is the number one thing colleges sell. It's on the homepage, in the brochure, and in every admissions presentation your parents will sit through.
Don Philabaum recently broke down the latest staffing and compensation benchmarks from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the people who track this stuff for a living.
Three numbers stand out:
$102. That's the average annual investment per student in career services. That’s not per month, but per year. You spend more than that on Spotify.
3,300 to 1. That's the ratio of students to professional career services staff. One human being, responsible for the professional futures of an entire small town. And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands of alumni who also call when they need help.
74%. That's the share of staff time consumed by direct student service: the endless assembly line of resume reviews and "so, what should I do with my life?" conversations. Which leaves precious little time for the strategic work that actually creates outcomes: employer relationships, internship pipelines, and programming that reaches students before senior-year panic sets in.
This is not an indictment of the people working in career services offices. Career services professionals are among the most dedicated people on campus, who are single-minded in their desire to improve outcomes. Their dedication to you isn’t the problem. The budget is. And as AI impacts entry-level employment, their challenges compound.
Insiders Have Been Saying This for Years
Don't take it from me. Take it from the people who run this world.
Ryan Craig, managing director at Achieve Partners and one of the sharpest writers on the college-to-career gap, once described career services as "the Las Vegas of the university" with students betting their futures against long odds. His description of the classic model: a handful of overbooked counselors trying to serve thousands. And the stakes have only gone up. In a recent U.S. News piece, Craig and co-author Jane Swift argued that colleges unable to reliably deliver internships risk watching students walk away — and revenue evaporate — as the market shifts toward programs that lead to real jobs.
Then there's Andy Chan, Wake Forest University’s VP of Personal and Career Development, who gave a now-famous TEDx talk titled "Career Services Must Die." His argument wasn't that career support doesn't matter. It's that the very phrase "career services" signals to students that career is one little office you visit senior year, instead of a question woven through all four years. Nearly a decade after that talk, Chan has observed that some schools rebuilt and refunded their career offices, but for the majority, not much really changed.
Even NACE's own president, Shawn VanDerziel, says the model starts too late. Creating career-ready students shouldn't begin in the second semester of senior year. Career readiness should be integrated into every step of the student experience, starting at orientation.
So when the guy publishing the data, the investor analyzing it, and the campus leader living it all agree, maybe we should believe them.
Read the Budget, Not the Brochure
In my day job, I evaluate companies. And here's the first rule of that work: nobody buys a company because the lobby has nice couches. You read the numbers because the numbers provide the ground truth, as opposed to what the pitch deck or sales brochure says.
The same rule applies to your expensive investment in higher education. Every college will tell you outcomes matter. The budget is a strong signal of whether they back it up. So when you're on a campus tour — sometime between the espresso bar in the student union and the make-your-own-poke station in the dining hall — ask your guide these questions:
"What's your student-to-career-advisor ratio?" Now you know the national average is roughly 3,300 to 1.
"When do students first work with career services?" The right answer starts with "first year." If career prep begins when seniors show up in October clutching a resume, you're looking at a fire department, not a fitness program.
"What percentage of last year's graduates responded to your outcomes survey?" This one's sneaky. Those glossy "96% employed!" stats often come from surveys only a fraction of graduates answered. Guess which graduates are eager to report back. This is why asking for the response rate matters.
"How many employers recruited on campus last year? What percentage of students did internships or co-ops for credit?" If they have specific numbers, any numbers, that tells you something. Most will say they don’t know, but they will be happy to follow up with you. Give them your contact information. You want the facts.
The $102 figure is only an average, and averages hide enormous variation in how a college improves career outcomes beyond the budget of the career services office. Some schools treat career preparation as a holistic four-year journey: integrating practical experience within coursework, funded internships, research opportunities, and alumni networks that actually pick up the phone. Those schools exist at every price point and every level of selectivity. Your job is to find schools that are both above average AND do a lot more to help prepare you to launch your career.
One more thing. If you are already in college and meet someone doing heroic work with a shoestring budget when you visit your career center, be kind to them. They're on your side. Philabaum, Craig, Chan, and VanDerziel have been making their case for years.
Discover more insights in my book, Indispensable: A Student’s Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI.
Published by Damn Gravity, Indispensable takes a practical look at how students can develop the habits, skills, and mindset they'll need to thrive as technology advances.
