Sundar Kumarasamy spent three decades inside American higher education and founded Excelerate to scale career readiness for every student.
getty
I once sat with a career services director who had just posted a 93% placement rate: best in his institution’s history.
Yet, he was not celebrating. He had spent that spring watching senior students walk into his office three weeks before graduation with no idea what they were good at. While he helped many of them find jobs, at the same time that his placement number went up, his confidence fell apart.
That conversation exposes something the sector rarely admits. We built our accountability system around a number that measures timing rather than readiness. A graduate who lands a role six weeks after commencement and quits within eight months is a win. A graduate who takes a year to build real capability and then enters a field deliberately is a delay. The scorecard cannot tell those two people apart. It cannot measure whether a graduate knows what they can do, what value they bring and how to build on it.
This is not a failure of career services. The constraint is structural, not personnel. Those professionals inherited a metric they did not design and cannot control, often carrying caseloads of several hundred students.
The pressure comes from further up. Boards ask for the placement rate because the system taught them to, and rankings reinforce it every cycle.
What the Number Hides
The National Association of Colleges and Employers tracks first-destination outcomes, and that data has value. But a first destination records where someone landed. It cannot see whether they stay, grow or stall. In an AI-shaped economy, those changes arrive faster than any curriculum cycle.
Look further out and the limits become clear. Strada Education Foundation’s Talent Disrupted research found that 52% of bachelor’s degree graduates are not working in a college-level job within a year, and 45% remain underemployed a decade later. Many were counted as placed. We have been reporting employment and describing it as readiness.
The readiness problem begins at enrollment, not at graduation. Measuring employability readiness at enrollment gives institutions a baseline to work from instead of a failure to explain at the end. Count only at the exit and you see the gap when it is too late to close it.
Measure It Before You Announce It
Here is the part most leaders skip. They announce new metrics before they have run them. Choose two or three measures and run them internally alongside the placement rate for two full cycles, saying nothing publicly. Start with a sample cohort. If a placement rate reads 93% while an intentional pathway rate reads 34%, the contrast makes its case. Trustees who never questioned the scorecard start asking a different question.
Announce first and you get a fight about methodology. Measure first and you walk into the board meeting with evidence that changes the conversation.
Three Measures Worth Running
Professional self-awareness asks whether a student can describe their capabilities in language an employer recognizes. This is more measurable than it sounds.
Ask sophomores to name three strengths with evidence for each, then have two trained reviewers score the answers on a simple band: weak, developing or employer-ready. No new technology required. Advisors already do a version of this informally. What it can reveal is uncomfortable: Some students have had access to coaching outside the institution, an advantage that placement rates can hide completely.
Intentional pathway rate asks what share of students are pursuing a direction they consciously chose, tested and can explain. A declared major does not count, because declaring is an administrative act and choosing is a developmental process.
When AAC&U, NACE and the Society for Experiential Education surveyed nearly 7,500 faculty and staff, the gap was not whether experiences existed. It was whether reflection was built in. Count a pathway only when a student has named a direction, tested it through a real experience and explained what that experience confirmed or changed. This can begin with structured reflection in internships, projects and research students already complete.
Verified capability asks whether anyone outside the institution has witnessed what a student can do. A portfolio the institution grades on its own is a claim. A project an employer scoped and validated is documentation. Employers have every reason to participate, because judging real student work gives them a more reliable read on a candidate than any resume screen. What the measure reveals might sting; count only externally validated work and the number will drop sharply in year one.
That drop is the moment most leaders retreat, but this is the wrong instinct. A low readiness number in year one is not an indictment; it is a baseline. It is the one thing a placement rate can never give you: somewhere to grow from, and proof when you do.
The riskiest number in higher education is not the low one nobody has seen yet. It is the high one nobody believes.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
