When career services teams talk about their value, engagement numbers often come first: how many students booked appointments, how many attended career fairs, or how many logged into online services. These metrics are easy to track and report — but they tell decision-makers very little about the actual return on investment (ROI) that career services deliver for students and institutions.

Institutional leaders are increasingly asking for evidence that career services actually move the needle on meaningful outcomes like employment outcomes, workforce readiness, and long-term career success. Simply reporting high utilization rates — “our center served 70 % of students” — won’t meet that demand. To justify sustained and increased funding, career services professionals must shift from counting activity to demonstrating impact supported by rigorous evidence.

It’s important to acknowledge that high engagement can signal relevance — but it shouldn’t be mistaken for demonstrable impact. Tools like the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) measure participation in educationally purposeful activities across campuses, including collaborative learning and faculty interaction. Yet even NSSE’s data cannot tell institutions whether specific services like career advising improve post-graduation success beyond participation rates.

At most universities, engagement data show only that students are present — not that their time with career services meaningfully improved their career outcomes. Academic research in higher education consistently warns that participation is not a reliable proxy for learning or long-term outcomes. In broader educational literature, engagement has only modest relationships with learning gains when compared to deeper competency development or outcomes tracking.

This gap — between engagement metrics and outcomes — is why traditional utilization statistics alone make a weak argument for budget allocations: they speak to activity, not impact or value.

Higher education leaders are increasingly focused on hard outcomes, particularly in an environment of rising tuition, scrutiny over value, and accountability pressures. According to the OECD’s Resourcing Higher Education Project, policymakers and institutional decision-makers expect reliable evidence that financial and human resource investments actually contribute to measurable student success.

In career development specifically, research by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) shows that traditional reporting on services (“we held 50 résumé workshops”) does not illustrate student impact. Instead, NACE’s Class of 2022 Student Survey found that students who used at least one career service received an average of 1.24 job offers, compared to 1.0 for those who did not use services at all. This type of outcome data helps make a credible case for resource allocation because it connects services to measurable post-graduation results.

However, even that data point must be interpreted carefully: engagement with career services can correlate with better outcomes, but correlation is not causation. Without rigorous controls and longitudinal tracking, higher utilization might be a marker of already motivated students rather than proof that services drove the outcomes.

To shift ROI conversations from “activities delivered” to “results produced,” career services leaders need to demonstrate:

Contribution to employability outcomes

Career services involvement — such as internship placements, interview preparation, and networking coaching — is associated with better job outcomes. NACE’s research showing a higher average number of job offers among service users provides one example.

Connection to institutional goals such as retention and graduation

ROI arguments resonate more with leadership when career services can show influence on traditionally valued institutional metrics like retention, graduation rates, and post-graduation earnings — outcomes that tie into broader strategic priorities.

Equity of impact

Institutions want evidence that career services help all students, including those from historically underserved backgrounds, to succeed. Disaggregated outcomes data — not mere usage counts — reveal whether impact is equitably distributed.

Longitudinal effects

Short-term engagement trends don’t capture sustained value. Data that follows students from their first engagement through their first job or graduate pathway provides a stronger ROI story than snapshot participation statistics.

Engagement metrics show interest and need — but they don’t substantiate value. Institutional budgets increasingly focus on strategic priorities like student success, workforce alignment, and regional economic impact. Administrators are more likely to fund units that can demonstrate contribution to these areas, not just activity levels.

The OECD’s work on resourcing higher education highlights that, while higher education investments have increased, it remains challenging to produce consistent evidence that these investments effectively support outcomes. Career services must therefore align their measurement approaches with broader institutional performance frameworks if they want to justify and grow their budgets.

To make a strong funding argument, career services should:

• Shift KPIs from activity to impact, such as employment outcomes, career readiness competencies, internship conversion rates, and employer satisfaction.
• Integrate career outcomes into institutional dashboards, showing how services contribute to mission-critical outcomes.
• Use predictive analytics to model how early career engagement affects long-term success, rather than relying predominantly on attendance counts.

Institutions that link career services funding directly to outcomes measurement are better equipped to demonstrate ROI and secure ongoing support, especially when budgets tighten.

Career services teams that rely on “student engagement” as a central funding justification are using weak evidence to support high-stakes decisions. Engagement tells us who shows up — but not how far those interactions move students toward employability, stability, or long-term career success. To convincingly argue for funding, career services must shift their measurement focus to meaningful outcomes, backed by data that leadership cares about: employment results, retention impact, and readiness metrics.

If your team is ready to strengthen your ROI story with outcome-oriented measurement systems, book a demo of HubbedIn’s platform to see how integrated tracking and reporting makes these arguments stronger and easier to present to institutional leadership.