Graduate student Dan Davis and Professor Amy Binder’s research on career services’ “headhunting” practices, originally published in the journal Research in the Sociology of Organizations, was picked up by the online magazine Inside Higher Ed .
In their article, Davis and Binder show that university career centers are embracing a new model of career services. Rather than focus most of their energy preparing students to lead their own career searches, they are increasingly leaning on corporate partnership programs to secure student job-placements and raise funds. The career centers offer a menu of services, with preferential access to the best students chief among them, to the corporations able and willing to pay fees. While this new strategy is good for some students landing jobs, some career centers raising funds, and some companies securing talent; it is also potentially problematic for students whose campuses lacking such partnerships, career centers facing underfunding, and some companies who cannot afford the fees involved.