Not Many College Grads Find Career Services Very Helpful

Landing your first job after college can be a difficult, stressful process, and not many college graduates feel their university’s career services offices gave them the help and support they wanted, according to a Gallup poll spotted by The Atlantic. Only 16 percent of graduates of all ages (from the 1940s to the class of 2016) say their experience was “very helpful,” and only 27 percent say it was “helpful.” In total, about two in five graduates think visiting the career counselors at their school was useful. Another 16 percent found it “not at all helpful.”

Even if they had a good experience, students didn’t think career services really prepared them for the real world. “Graduates who visited their career services office are not much more likely than those who did not to believe their university prepared them well for life outside of college, to say their education was worth the cost and to recommend their university to others,” according to Gallup.

Recent college grads in the U.S. have an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, and a 12.6 percent underemployment rate (meaning they might be working as a barista instead of putting that sociology degree to use at work). College career services have an important duty, then, to help students get jobs and launch careers, so it’s important that the experience be helpful.

The results are based on online surveys of 11,483 people with at least a bachelor’s degree between August and October of 2016.