How to Find Out Where Your Graduates Work

If you want to know where your graduates work, you have five real options. Run a first-destination survey, search for graduates one by one on LinkedIn, match enrollment records through the National Student Clearinghouse, request state wage data, or verify outcomes directly against public records. The fastest path to a real answer for a full class is the last one, since a public data verification scan checks employer listings and enrollment records directly instead of waiting for anyone to respond. What follows walks through how each method actually works, what it costs you in time or coverage, and where a free scan on your last class fits in.

The methods career services teams actually use

Most offices end up running some combination of the five methods below, usually in this order, because each one gets added to patch a gap the last one left open.

First-destination surveys

The first-destination survey is still the default. Career services sends a form to the graduating class within six months of commencement and asks what they are doing now. It is cheap to run, and it is the format NACE expects for standardized reporting. The catch is response rate. Graduates who already have a job and moved on are the least likely group to open another survey, so the classes with the best story to tell often have the thinnest data behind it. The first-destination data gap covers how that response-rate ceiling turns into a knowledge rate problem once accreditors and state funding formulas start asking how you know the number is real.

LinkedIn and manual research

When the survey comes back thin, someone on staff usually starts searching manually. They pull the graduate list, look up each name on LinkedIn, and log what they find in a spreadsheet. It works, and it catches people the survey missed. It also does not scale. A few hundred names take days of staff time, common names and locked-down profiles produce dead ends, and the moment one class is done the next class graduates. If your team is trying to formalize this process instead of running it ad hoc, our guide to first-destination survey software compares the tools built around this workflow.

National Student Clearinghouse StudentTracker

Most schools already work with the National Student Clearinghouse for enrollment verification and degree reporting. The same organization runs a service called StudentTracker that answers a narrower but useful question, where graduates went for more school. You submit your graduate roster, and NSC matches it against enrollment records reported by the thousands of participating institutions in its network, returning transfer activity, continuing education enrollment, and degree progress. It is a real, established option for the continuing education half of the question. It will not tell you anything about employment, and it only sees enrollment at participating institutions, so a graduate who enrolls somewhere outside that network will not show up.

State wage record matching

A number of states run their own version of this for employment. Through data-sharing agreements built on federally funded Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, a state workforce or education agency matches graduate records against unemployment insurance wage records and reports back aggregate employment and earnings figures for a cohort or program. It is a legitimate source, and it is part of why states can build performance funding formulas around wage outcomes at all. It is also slow to arrive, it comes back aggregated at the cohort or program level rather than per graduate, and it only covers in-state employment reported through that state's UI system, so graduates who move out of state or work for an employer outside standard UI reporting will not appear in it.

Public data verification

The newest option skips waiting on anyone to respond and checks the public record directly. This is what the Prentus outcomes scan does. You give it your school or program, it researches the organization and the graduating class, and it checks employer listings, professional profiles, and public enrollment records for each graduate, employment and continuing education together. Every match links to the specific evidence behind it, so your team can open it and check the work instead of taking a number on faith. The first 25 graduates in a class are free to check, with no account and no card required. For a full class, book a demo and we will walk you through Prentus Outcomes.

Where your graduates continued their education

Employment is usually the first question, but where your students continued their education is a distinct one that a first-destination survey often handles poorly. A form built around job status has a hard time telling a graduate in a funded doctoral program apart from one who never found work at all. Continuing education deserves its own line in your reporting, not a leftover checkbox on the employment question.

NSC StudentTracker is the most established option here, since it matches your graduate roster directly against enrollment records at thousands of other institutions. A public data verification scan checks the same question a different way, by looking for graduate program enrollment, licensure programs, and certificate completions that show up in public records, alongside employment matches, in the same pass. That matters for programs feeding students into medicine, law, or research careers, where the honest six-month outcome is enrollment, not a paycheck.

• Ask the question separately. Report continuing education as its own outcome category, not a subset of "not employed."
• Match against enrollment records, not memory. A survey response depends on a graduate remembering to mention it. Enrollment matching does not.
• Check both in the same pass. Running employment and continuing education as separate projects usually means one of them quietly loses its budget.

None of the five methods above is wrong. A survey is useful even at a modest response rate, manual LinkedIn research catches real people the other methods miss, StudentTracker remains the right tool for continuing education, and state wage data is often the only evidence a legislature will accept for aggregate reporting. What changes is how fast you can get a defensible answer for one class right now, and public data verification is built for exactly that.

Verifying graduate employment without a survey

Public data verification checks a defined set of acceptable evidence sources instead of waiting on a form to come back. An employer's own staff or newsroom listing counts, a professional profile showing a current employer and title counts, and enrollment records for graduates who continued their education count. What does not count is a secondhand mention or an out-of-date listing with no way to confirm the date.

Sources conflict more often than teams expect, a professional profile lagging behind a recent job change, or an employer listing that predates a graduate's move. A written verification policy should say in advance how conflicts get resolved rather than leaving it to whoever is looking that day. The more recent and more specific source wins, and the conflict gets logged instead of silently discarded, so the record stays defensible if anyone asks how a match was made.

The payoff shows up in the knowledge rate. Survey-only collection depends entirely on who answers, and a lot of schools land well under the 65 percent knowledge rate NACE requires before it will consider an outcome reportable. Reconciled public data verification checks every graduate against the record instead of waiting to be told, which is why it reaches a knowledge rate survey response can rarely match on its own.