Tyton Partners just published its 2026 Listening to Learners study, surveying more than 1,800 undergraduates across nearly 1,100 institutions, and it puts a hard number on something career services teams have suspected for years. At best, a quarter of students actually use the support services their school offers.
What is the student support utilization gap? The student support utilization gap is the disconnect between the support services colleges fund and offer and the share of students who actually use them. Tyton Partners' Listening to Learners 2026 survey found only about 25% of undergraduates use available support services, and among non-users, just 9% cited lack of awareness while 51% said the service did not feel relevant to them. Prentus builds AI-assisted advising that surfaces relevant support to each student individually, rather than relying on generic outreach campaigns.
Institutions are diagnosing the wrong problem
When Tyton asked students who skip support services why, only 9% said they didn't know the services existed. The real answer, from 51% of students, is that they weren't convinced the service was relevant to them. Another 26% pointed to inconvenient hours or access.
Meanwhile, 45% of institutional leaders still believe awareness is the main barrier to utilization. That gap between what schools think is broken and what students say is broken explains a lot about why utilization stays flat even after another round of email campaigns and flyers.
For Career Services Teams at Universities
Relevance is a targeting problem, not a marketing problem
If 51% of non-users say a service didn't feel relevant to them, more outreach volume won't fix it. What changes utilization is support that responds to each student's actual situation, not a blast email sent to an entire class year.
Students still can't connect their major to a career
The same survey found only 31% of students feel they can connect their major to a career path, and just one in four are currently in an internship, even though clear career direction and hands-on experience are the two things students say they want most.
Faculty report embedding real-world projects into coursework at roughly twice the rate students say they actually experience them. Something is getting lost between what gets designed in a curriculum committee and what a student notices in a classroom.
Students want AI and people, not one instead of the other
Sixty-one percent of students now use AI weekly, up from 42% a year ago, and students who use AI tools report lower stress and stronger academic confidence, according to Tyton Partners' full release. But 56% of students still want human support services alongside the technology, not instead of it.
Students are not choosing between AI and people. They are asking institutions to combine the two well enough that support finally feels relevant to them specifically, not generic advice aimed at an average student who doesn't exist.
- Only a quarter of students use available support services. Among non-users, 51% cite unclear relevance and 26% cite access, while just 9% cite awareness.
- Institutions are solving for the wrong barrier. 45% of leaders believe awareness is the problem, when students say it isn't.
- Career-path clarity is scarce. Only 31% of students can connect their major to a career, and just one in four have an internship.
- Students want AI plus people. 61% use AI weekly, but 56% still want human support alongside it.
Institutions that treat this as a communications problem will keep sending the same emails to the same 25% of students who were already coming in. The ones that close the gap will be the ones that make support feel built for the individual student in front of them, not the average student the campaign was written for. That's a targeting and relevance problem, and it's solvable with the data most colleges already have, like course history, engagement patterns identified in the EAB student success research, and career interest signals, if it gets used to personalize outreach instead of broadcast it.
If you are exploring how AI could fit into your career services model, we would welcome the conversation.
