by Rosario Scandurra
In May, I presented at the SRHE webinar, Using administrative data for employability/employment research in higher education: insights on findings, methodology and impact, the results of a paper that were still under review. The article, co-authored with Kristinn Hermannsson (University of Glasgow) and Stefano Fusaro (European Commission, Joint Research Centre), is now open access in the International Journal of Manpower, and this post picks up where that discussion left off.
Careers services occupy an interesting intermediatory position in higher education. Everyone agrees they matter, yet robust evidence that they affect graduates’ earnings is surprisingly thin. Research on placements and internships is stronger. Delis and Jones (2023) estimate a 4% salary premium for UK sandwich placements, and Margaryan and colleagues (2022) estimate about 6% for mandatory internships in Germany. Placements embed students in workplaces and may offer a distinct comparative advantage to students who apply for them. The core business of a careers service (eg guidance, counselling, and vacancy matching) is to act as an intermediary between HE and the labour market. Whether intermediation on its own paid off was largely a matter of correlational evidence, generally limited to a small number of institutions, or even a single institution. That was the main conclusion of the systematic review of employability programmes that colleagues and I published in Studies in Higher Education in 2024 (Scandurra et al, 2024). This review reports many positive associations, but few designs could separate career service selection from its effect.
Catalonia is the right place to ask such a question. The graduate survey run by AQU Catalunya, the regional quality assurance agency, asks graduates how they found their first job, in a labour market where search frictions are unusually costly. In fact, temporary contracts are common (at least until the last labour market reform), and more than 35% of recent Spanish graduates work below their qualification level, compared with 21.5% in the EU. We use data from six waves (2008–2023) and a sample of 5,919 graduates under 30 who moved directly from a first degree into work. Around 7% found their first job through the university careers service. In raw terms, they earned about 20% more than everyone else, but they were also more often male, from engineering and from graduate families, so the aggregate earnings premium tells us little.
To obtain a causal estimate, we instrument for service uptake using peer exposure, defined as the share of graduates from the same university, field, and cohort who found their first job through career services. Graduates learn from each other what works, and social learning shifts uptake strongly while showing no relationship with ability, family background, or work experience.
The headline result is an earnings premium of around 8.5%, measured within four years after graduation. The heterogeneity is more substantial. The premium is close to 16% for women and statistically indistinguishable from zero for men. It is around 17% for graduates entering the market with no experience, fading after a year or two of employment for men while women retain about 14%.
Our reading is that careers services work as matching intermediaries rather than as sites of skill formation. They reduce search costs and information asymmetries at the moment of labour-market entry, and they matter most to graduates who lack networks, sector knowledge, and employer contacts. That is why the effect exceeds placement estimates and why it concentrates among women, the inexperienced, and fields with loosely institutionalised recruitment.
Three implications seem appropriate for an interested reader. First, the value of careers services is concentrated in the first transition, which argues for front-loading support around graduation. Second, the graduates with the highest returns are not those who use the service most. Left to self-selection, an effective service can reinforce existing advantage. Targeted, it becomes one of the few institutional levers with evidence of narrowing the early-career gender gap, a point that resonates with UK work on unequal returns to work experience (Luchinskaya and Tzanakou, 2025). Third, measurement: this study was made possible by a single survey question, asked consistently for 15 years, about how graduates found their first job. Graduate surveys that record the entry route would allow large-scale evaluation of career services.
However, several limits of the study should be taken into account. We used repeated cross-sections, so we cannot follow the same graduates over time. Estimates are confined to Catalonia, which has a tight graduate labour market. We identify the effect for graduates whose choices respond to their peers, arguably the very group outreach is meant to reach. Linked employer–graduate records would allow a direct test of the matching mechanism, and that is where we hope to go next.
Rosario Scandurra is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at UPF Barcelona School of Management, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, working on school-to-work transitions, graduate employability, and the territorial divide. The article is open access at https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-10-2025-0875.
