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Career Goals Alignment

8.3 / 10 ▼ falling

Ranked #3 of 21 in Academic · domain mean 7.9

Distribution of responses

Struggling (0-4) Neutral (>4-<8) Thriving (8-10)

How institutions vary

Measured across 16 institutions with enough responses on this topic.

See the institutional spread

How far apart the weakest and strongest institutions sit on Career Goals Alignment, and how much of a student's experience is decided by where they study.

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What we ask

Topic-level question

“My studies help me move toward my career goals.”

See all 4 questions and their adaptive follow-ups in the Question Library →

What students say, and why

Where it scores lowest

Pay and conditions undercut the sense that the path is worth it.

"The salary just doesn’t match what the work is worth."
Where it scores highest

Vocation: students see the work as exactly what they want to do.

"This is exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life."

One comment from each end. Representative, de-identified, translated where needed.

Read all 3 comments

The full set of de-identified student comments from the lowest- and highest-scoring responses on this topic.

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Related insights

No deep-dive published for this topic yet. Browse all insights or the methodology.

How we measure it

This is the topic-level average across its subtopics, on a 0-10 scale (higher is better), so an individual subtopic can score higher or lower than the topic shown here. Figures are scored responses from the last 12 months, mapped to the 2026 framework via the canonical question mapping. Movement compares the most recent six months with the prior six. Distribution bands: 0-4, >4-<8, 8-10. Cross-institution aggregate; no single institution identified; minimum group size applied.

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