New open-access article on the earnings effect of university career services and what it means for a critical approach to guidance from Rosario Scandurra, a Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at UPF Barcelona School of Management and a member of COCAG. The article is open access at https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-10-2025-0875.
Universities across Europe have spent two decades building up their career services. In Spain, the 2023 university law (LOSU) explicitly tasks universities with supporting their graduates’ employability. Yet when we systematically reviewed the literature for the Erasmus+ project Employability in Programme Development (EPD), in a paper published in Studies in Higher Education in 2024 (Do employability programmes in higher education improve skills and labour market outcomes?), we found that almost everything we knew about such services was correlational, small in scale and theoretically thin. Graduates who use career services do better, but they may have done well anyway. Our new article in the International Journal of Manpower, The career services premium, tries to get past that problem. It uses the graduate survey run by AQU Catalunya, the Catalan quality assurance agency, which asks graduates how they found their first job. We use six waves of data (2008–2023) comprising 5,919 graduates under 30 who moved directly from degree to work. More than 7% found their first job through the university career service; 30% through family or personal contacts.
To separate the service’s effect from its users’ characteristics, we use peer exposure, defined as the share of peer graduates from the same university, field, and cohort who found their first job through university career services. Graduates observe what worked for their peers.
What we find
Entering the labour market through career services raises annual earnings by around 8.5%, measured roughly four years after graduation, exceeding the 4–6.5% causal estimates for placements and mandatory internships in the UK and Germany.
The average hides the more interesting story. The premium is close to 16% for women and statistically indistinguishable from zero for men. It is around 17% for graduates with no work experience, and it fades after two years of employment, except for women, who keep a premium of around 14%.
Career services, in other words, do not make graduates more productive; they make the market work better for those who lack networks and employer contacts. They are matching intermediaries, most valuable where informal networks are weakest.
Why this matters for a critical perspective on guidance
First, the results push against reading “employability” as an individual attribute. The premium comes from institutional infrastructure that substitutes for social capital some graduates were never given. In this sense, guidance redistributes chances, narrowing the early-career gender gap and doing most for those entering the market with low parental intake.
Second, and this is the uncomfortable part, the people who use career services are not those who benefit most. Users in our data are disproportionately male, from engineering, and have graduate parents; the women and social science graduates for whom the effect is largest are under-represented, while nearly a third of graduates still find their first job through family and personal contacts, the channel most likely to reproduce advantage. An effective service, when accessed selectively, can widen inequalities even as it helps each person it reaches. The equity question is as much about uptake as about impact.
Third, a policy gap. The LOSU make employability part of every university’s agenda in Spain, but says little about resourcing, targeting or assessment. Uptake is socially biased, so outreach to the groups with the highest returns could change who walks through the door.
Where the work comes from
The article grew out of EPD (Erasmus+ KA2, 2020–2023), led by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the University of Reading, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and AQU Catalunya, to build a feedback loop from the labour market back into programme design. The gaps exposed by the Studies in Higher Education review led us to this paper, and COCAG’s networking support helped us reflect on the process and sharpen the argument through interactions within one of the project conferences.
Some limitations of the study should be kept in mind. We used repeated cross-sectional data, so we cannot say whether the premium persists over time. Estimates are confined to Catalonia, with its high temporary employment and public generalist-dominated universities. Comments and comparable data from other systems are very welcome from colleagues across the Action’s working groups.
