Your listing standards are policy

Why standards move employers and workshops don't

A workshop changes what a student does. A listing standard changes what an employer does. Employers adjust postings to meet a platform's requirements every day, because a posting that doesn't meet them doesn't reach the students. That's leverage a career center rarely uses on purpose.

The standard has to apply to tier-one employers as well, or it isn't a standard. That's where it costs something, and it's also where it does the most good, because those are the employers other employers copy.

Standard one: paid

NACE's student survey data is the cleanest evidence on this. Paid interns averaged 1.61 job offers. Unpaid interns averaged 0.94. Students with no internship averaged 0.77. An unpaid internship gets a student barely past doing nothing. For the Class of 2023, NACE reported a median starting salary of $67,500 for graduates who'd had paid internships and $45,000 for those whose internships were unpaid.

Unpaid internships also select on family income, since a student who needs summer earnings can't take one. That's the equity mechanism, and it runs through the career center's own listings.

NACE's position statement discourages unpaid internships at for-profit organizations. A listing policy that declines to post them, with a stipend requirement for nonprofit and government roles, is the single most effective equity intervention a center controls. It doesn't require a budget line.

Standard two: a salary range

Pay transparency laws now require salary ranges in postings in Colorado, California, New York, Washington, Illinois and several other states. Many of the employers posting on a campus platform are already required to disclose somewhere. The rest can be required by the platform.

The reason is plain. Students with professional networks calibrate offers by asking around. Students without them can't. A range in the posting is the cheapest information a career center can give the second group, and it's information the first group already has.

An employer that refuses to disclose a range on a campus platform is telling you something about how it intends to negotiate with a 22-year-old.

Standard three: entry-level means entry-level

Postings labeled entry-level that require two or three years of experience are common enough to have their own statistics, and the sources disagree on how common, from 35% to 61% depending on definition. On a campus platform, whatever the national figure, the posting is either mislabeled or it's telling students something about the applicant pool. Either way the employer should say which.

A simple standard: a posting labeled entry-level carries no minimum years of professional experience, or it's labeled something else. Employers asked to clarify usually will, because the mismatch costs them applicants they'd want and fills their inbox with ones they don't.

Standards worth considering

Application deadlines and a response commitment. Students report ghosting as the most demoralizing part of the search, and a posting that commits to a response by a date changes the experience even when the answer is no.

No ghost postings. Survey data suggests a meaningful share of online job ads are never filled or were posted with no intent to hire. Requiring that a posting represent a real, currently open role, with a close date, filters that out.

A sponsorship field. For international students, "do you sponsor" is now a question about wage level and cap-exempt status, and a posting that states the employer's position saves everyone a wasted application.

What happens when you do this

Posting counts drop. Say so to leadership before it happens, and report what replaces it: the share of postings meeting standards, employer compliance rates, and outcomes for students who applied through the platform.

Some employers route around the platform and recruit students directly. That's a real cost. It's also worth noticing that an employer who'd rather avoid your standards than meet them was going to treat your students the same way.

And the standards become a signal. Employers learn what the institution expects. Students learn what they're allowed to expect. Both adjust.

What would change this reading

If evidence showed students on platforms with strict standards had worse outcomes than students on open ones, the trade-off would need revisiting. If employers left campus platforms in large numbers in response to standards, the leverage argument would weaken. So far the evidence runs the other way: employers comply with platform requirements as a matter of routine, and the student-outcome data on paid versus unpaid work is not close.