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Do university careers services pay? What fifteen years of Catalan graduate data tell us

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.

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How universities behaving sensibly could destroy access to HE

by Rob Cuthbert

Since the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, national policy for higher education has left HE institutions to the mercies of a market overseen by a regulator, the Office for Students. Each year A-Levels results shine a spotlight on the consequences, which are already visible – major financial difficulties, academic staff redundancies, reductions in course and programme offerings. What everyone knows is that these are the consequences of the wrong kind of competition and a mix of government policies which have combined to slash HEI revenues. These consequences flow from behaviour by students and universities responding rationally, as best they can, to the policy context. But if higher education policy stays the same, the behaviours which seem so rational at institutional level will destroy opportunities for access to the whole higher education sector.

Everyone knew that 2026 would be another ‘highly competitive’ results round – for universities. Applicants, on the other hand, have discovered that there are higher-tariff universities making lower-tariff offers. Increasingly, their ‘insurance’ choices are not insurance against lower grades, but instead simply offer two chances to apply to high-tariff providers. Clearing increasingly offers more flexibility and more chances, if results are not what some had hoped. And things will only get better for applicants over the next five years or more. This is good news for some – the offspring of the mobile middle classes will be experiencing a buyer’s market for some time. But it may be increasingly bad news for others, who just live in the wrong place, may not have much social and financial capital, and can’t move far to go to university or another HE provider.

Everyone also knows what Bahram Bekhradnia pointed out in his recent HEPI Report, Demographic decline and predatory recruitment: the twin threats to English higher education into the 2040s. Population decline means that the number of 18 year olds will be almost 20% lower than at present by the late 2030s. It follows that unless an increasing proportion of young people apply to HE there will be 20% fewer students in English HE in ten years’ time, with a corresponding loss of revenue. However there is no sign of an increase in the proportions applying for HE, which is unsurprising given the intensity of media coverage of student debt and the associated question ‘Is higher education worth it?’. This, of course, is despite the evidence that there is still a ‘graduate premium’ in lifetime earnings, even if it is declining. There is no sign of demand weakening, and students’ satisfaction with their HE experience remains high, even edging higher in the most recent national survey.

Phil Hill in his OnEdTech blog on 13 August 2026 spotted the parallel contradictions in UK and US education policies: “Omar Khan … published a piece at Wonkhe this week arguing that UK policy on graduate earnings contradicts itself. The government wants the graduate earnings premium to rise … It also wants parity of esteem for young people who don’t go to university. Khan calls out the problem: “no amount of rhetorical flourish can make both graduates and non-graduates earn more than the other in their monthly payslips.” … Based on the latest ED [US Education Department] data, 29.0% of undergraduate certificate programs and 6.6% of associate degree programs would fail the earnings premium rules, while just 1.2% of bachelor degree programs would fail. The actual policy is about to put a massive constraint on non-degree student programs. … So which is it? Are we building short-form pathways or auditing them out of existence? The UK can’t decide whether it wants the premium up or the gap closed. The US can’t decide whether it is promoting the alternatives or testing them to death. The earnings premium is not solely an American idea being argued in American terms. Not only is the earnings premium idea bipartisan in the US, it is international and may be growing in scope.”

Phil Hill’s associate Glenda Morgan underlined the parallels between the US and the UK in her On Student Success website. “Two recent reports – one on American public higher education from NCHEMS and another on English universities from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) – show what this looks like in practice. Higher education systems are, like it or not, stratified by prestige, selectivity, wealth, and recruiting power. That is a description of institutional position, not a judgment about educational quality or public value. But what happens when the number of prospective students stops growing? In a stagnant or shrinking market, institutions cannot all maintain their enrollment by capturing a larger share. Growth becomes increasingly redistributive: one institution’s gain is more likely to produce losses elsewhere. Better-resourced institutions expand into markets traditionally served by other colleges and universities. Institutions with less power in the hierarchy respond by adding programs, recruiting new student populations, or moving into the territory of still more vulnerable institutions. Each decision may be rational for the institution that makes it. Collectively, however, these decisions can leave higher education systems more hierarchical, less stable, and less capable of serving students who depend on affordable and geographically accessible options”

UK government policy restricting applications by foreign students, driven by concerns over immigration, has severely reduced the alternative revenue-generating options for most universities, as recently recognised by the mainstream media. Louise Eccles, Robert Watts and Yennah Smart wrote in The Sunday Times on 8 August 2026, previewing A-level results day: “Foreign student slump forces A* universities to accept BBB grades”. At the same time there are now 700,000 (31%) of UK students, facing the prospect of huge debt from student loans, who choose or are compelled to stay in the family home and become commuters to a university within reach.

Applications from the UK are increasing for STEM and related disciplines, which applicants probably believe will offer better career and financial prospects for graduates. (FFT Education Datalab provides authoritative analyses of trends and variations in patterns of achievement.) Institutions respond by taking a medium or long-term view and reshaping their academic offering in response to changes in application patterns. Rather than making across-the-board reductions. many institutions choose to eliminate entire subjects or fields of study. The British Academy’s recent report, Cold Spots: Mapping Inequality in SHAPE Provision in UK Higher Education, spelt out the danger underlined in the recent SRHE blog by Christopher Playford and colleagues at Exeter: “Some students travel far from home to attend university. But many do not, and many cannot. The rising cost of higher education means that for students from lower-income families, mature students, commuters, carers and those with strong local ties, the possibility of studying close to home can determine whether higher education is realistic at all. Local provision of higher education therefore affects what courses are available to young people.”

UK government policy choices have made things worse for HE, by encouraging the mis-framing of HE as ‘academic’ and FE as ‘vocational’ and putting HE and FE sectors into competition rather than supporting the FE-HE collaboration which is essential, and seems to be appreciated much more in Wales and Scotland than in England. Other policy initiatives have significantly reduced HE revenues, with increased National Insurance charges for employers, a levy on overseas student fees, and changes to student visa requirements reducing demand from overseas applicants. There were media reports on 21 August 2026 that the government might agree to cut overseas fees for EU students as part of its broader attempts at rapprochement with Europe, further reducing revenue for already cash-strapped universities. These reductions have far outweighed the benefit from ending the long-term freeze of undergraduate fee levels. Real-terms institutional income has been reduced to levels not seen since 2010, well below the economic cost of delivering undergraduate education.

Institutions are behaving rationally in their own interests, within the prevailing policy context. Applicants are behaving rationally and consistently in responding to the incentives and opportunities presented to them. It is the policy that needs to change – we urgently need financial incentives or rewards for institutions seeking to maintain opportunities for reasonably local and regional study across the country. Without such changes the HE sector may see the participation rate decline, in sharp contrast to the global trend almost everywhere else. That would be an astonishing response, in one of the UK’s most globally successful sectors, to the UK’s need for economic growth. This is a particularly English problem: different government structures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland offer more opportunities for intervention. But the market in English HE has failed to protect access, and things will get worse unless the government chooses to intervene. Those earlier policy creations, the University Grants Committee and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as funding agencies delivering most of the funds for teaching, would have found it feasible, perhaps even comparatively straightforward to address the problem. The question is whether government now wants it to happen, and whether the Office for Students as regulator has the competence and capability to do what needs to be done.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.