More than two-thirds don’t meaningfully engage with career services—why existing resources go unused

Most colleges already pay for career help their students never touch: job boards, assessment tools, mock interview platforms, resume builders, employer events, alumni networks. According to David Kozhuk, founder and CEO of uConnect, more than two-thirds of students don't meaningfully engage with career services.

That gap is getting harder to ignore. Prospective students want a return on rising tuition, enrollment is under pressure, and policy is starting to hold schools to career outcomes and median earnings. Kozhuk's argument, built over 12 or 13 years and more than 300 colleges and universities now running uConnect's virtual career center, is that the fix is not more resources. It is making the ones that exist easy to find, and using a school's own outcome data to point each student to the right ones.

Three students in a room built for 150

Kozhuk started using career services in his first semester at UMass Amherst. He graduated in 2008 with a finance degree and four or five internships, then started his career at a small private equity firm in Boston. He credits that start mostly to having time to explore career pathways and network with alumni while still in school.

A couple of years later, the firm launched a second fund and asked him to recruit junior analysts. He called the head of career services at his alma mater. The school reserved the business school's main auditorium and had the dean introduce him. The room held about 150 people. Three students showed up, on a campus of 25,000 at the time.

With no interviews to run, he spent the afternoon asking the head of career services whether that was typical. It was. Engaging students was one of her team's biggest challenges, and it was getting harder as Instagram, Twitter and smartphone apps took over students' attention. As Kozhuk recounts it, she told him, "a lot of our messaging falls on deaf ears."

He then took a couple of weeks off, drove from Boston to Philadelphia and back, and walked into 100 career centers. Every office described the same process, one he calls outdated, and every one named student engagement as a top challenge. Nine months to the day after the empty auditorium, he quit his job to build uConnect full time. His personal experience and the road trip pointed to the same diagnosis.

So instead of building another job board or a better point solution, uConnect set out to build the infrastructure that ties the existing resources together. Kozhuk compares it to the learning management system on the academic side, where everything is packaged in one place and students can find what's relevant. Without that on the career side, he says, the digital setup is so scattered that even faculty and staff can't say what's available. They point students to the career center and tell them to book an appointment.

Everyone agrees on the problem. Fewer fund the fix.

Kozhuk says the pitch lands with schools almost 100% of the time. Career leaders spend years building programs, developing employer relationships and bringing in tools, and they know much of it goes unused. Nobody he talks to doubts the problem.

What holds it back, in his view, is where career services sits on campus. Senior leaders have long treated it as one more student service, while the LMS is core to the academic experience and treated as table stakes. Host Darin Francis of Harbinger Lane summed up the result: an opt-in model. Students who go looking find help. Everyone else doesn't, and the office gets funded to match. As long as enrollment held up, Kozhuk says, "there's no consequence there."

He sees that changing, more in the last 12 to 18 months than at any time he's seen before. He points to three pressures arriving together: more pushback from prospective students about return on investment, more downward pressure on enrollment, and policy that requires schools to meet expectations on career outcomes and median earnings. In his framing, the question has moved from whether this is a problem to whether it is a priority for senior leadership.

Outcome data as a map, not a report card

When a school deploys uConnect, the first job is an inventory: which systems, tools and databases exist on campus, which ones to integrate, and how to present them to students. Kozhuk describes the platform as agnostic. It integrates with most common higher ed tools and doesn't copy the features of job boards, assessment tools, skill-building platforms, mock interview tools or resume platforms. Its job is to push students toward the tools the school already has.

The second job is data. uConnect asks each partner to import its historical first destination survey data, linked to what those students did on campus: the courses they took, whether they did experiential learning, the internships they held.

Most senior leaders read that data as an assessment of how well the institution delivers outcomes, and new policy uses it the same way. Kozhuk doesn't dismiss that use. He argues the same records are also a database of pathways: what kinds of students, from what backgrounds and programs, did what on campus and ended up where. With enough history, a school can see patterns in where its own students have succeeded.

His example: if 5,000 students over ten years went into the nonprofit sector, a school can look at the classes they took, the experiential learning they did, the resources they used and the alumni they connected with. A new student who wants nonprofit work can then get specific suggestions. The platform can also match students to peers with the same major, or who are also first-generation students or student athletes. Kozhuk says that matters because most students avoid career development out of intimidation. They don't know where to start, and the process feels like a black box.

He says this use of the data is new to most higher ed leaders, and many are sensitive about sharing it at first. The conversation changes, he says, once they see it being used to steer students toward their own resources. Kozhuk adds that AI makes it possible both to analyze the data better and to deliver it to students in a more personalized way.

The same data also shows where things are failing. Segmented by cohort, major, program or college, it can flag programs where students struggled to land internships, get experiential learning or reach expected median earnings. Francis noted that some state legislatures already require internships in certain degree programs, and that a school redesigning curriculum could start from its own campus data on what drove the best outcomes. Kozhuk's answer: "Or the gaps are." With federal and state funding starting to follow these expectations, he argues, the pressure to act on those gaps is rising.

What engagement is worth, and the staff time it frees

For uConnect's first several years, success meant engagement: how many students used career development before the platform and after. Several years in, Kozhuk says, the company found that engaged students were also getting better outcomes, and it now ties its return on investment to those outcomes.

Kozhuk adds that engaged students also show better persistence and completion rates than students who aren't engaged. These figures compare engaged students with everyone else across uConnect's network, as he reports them. Students who choose to engage may differ in other ways, so the stronger test for any single school is its own before-and-after picture.

The platform is built for that kind of comparison. Kozhuk says most schools can pull analytics from each tool separately but have no single view of student engagement with career development. Because schools import outcome data from before implementation, results can be compared against the school's own history, against peers and against national NACE benchmarks. Leaders also get heat maps showing which student populations are engaged and which aren't, plus communication tools to reach the ones who aren't.

Then there are the staffing numbers. Kozhuk says most career teams have three to six professionals serving 8,000 to 10,000 students. A virtual career center that's open around the clock lets students get "to the 50 yard line" on their own. Staff can then spend their time on higher-value work: advising, events and programs, employer meetings and alumni networking. In his words, if a team with ratios that daunting spends a third of its time answering the same basic questions over and over, that adds up to a lot of wasted energy.

Adding the labor market, and a place to hold it all

Kozhuk says uConnect has long pointed out gaps in student engagement. More recently it has started pointing out gaps in what schools offer, then finding partners to fill them. He calls the company "Switzerland": a neutral platform built to connect the right career resource with the right student at the right time, with recommendations he describes as objective.

The bigger addition is labor market data. Entry-level hiring is in flux. Kozhuk notes that one week's articles say employers need fewer entry-level hires because of AI, and the next week's say they need more because younger workers are better with it. Pathways that worked for past graduates may not be enough on their own. "The ability to effectively guide a critical mass of students towards great outcomes without having labor market data, is a fool's errand," he says.

uConnect has partnered with Lightcast, a labor market data provider, to put that data into the student-facing career experience. Kozhuk says this is new ground for Lightcast too, since schools have mostly used its data for program development, advancement and recruiting rather than career services. He also sees it as a credibility fix. In pockets, students feel the career center can't help them or doesn't know what they need. Real data gives advisers more authority with students and with other stakeholders on campus.

Francis closed with what he sees from the consulting side. Most of the edtech entering higher ed now targets something next to career readiness, such as experiential learning, internship development or tracking. Some schools he's spoken with require three internships over a bachelor's degree, with different preparation for each one. Schools want more of all of it, and the common thread, he says, is that "we need something to actually house this."

Kozhuk would agree that the resources were never the hard part. What stays open is whether a school builds something that holds those resources together and connects them to every student, not just the three who show up, and whether senior leadership now treats that as worth funding.