The State of Higher Ed series · 2025 edition
Addressing the soft-skills gap.
Undergraduates feel ready for work. Employers want a skill only half of them rank as critical. The 2025 findings measure that gap precisely — and show that students close it themselves, years too late.
Key takeaways
Key findings
One gap, measured precisely
The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) surveyed 3,790 undergraduates, graduate students, recent graduates, and administrators about the distance between what higher education teaches and what employers hire for. One finding organizes all the others.
Who calls problem-solving critical?
This is not a story about unmotivated students. 87.2% of undergraduates feel prepared for the workplace and 83.6% say they have learned both technical and soft skills. They are confident, and they are working from an incomplete picture of what employers screen for.
The most useful pattern in the data is what happens after graduation. Recognition of problem-solving as a critical skill rises sharply with each cohort.
Problem-solving recognized as critical, by cohort
The skill is not unteachable — it is currently learned after graduation, at the student’s own expense. Moving that recognition earlier is the intervention the data points to.
Are colleges offering enough value?
The value case still holds — and it is being tested
Students have not lost faith in their institutions. The 2025 findings show a student body that believes in the transaction it entered and a public that is increasingly interrogating it.
That last figure is the most actionable line in the report for anyone in Student Affairs or Student Success. Students already believe the institution is on their side, which means a new requirement, a redesigned first-year seminar, or a mandatory career milestone will be received as help rather than imposition.
Outside the classroom, the return on a degree remains defensible. 73% of Americans say higher education still offers a good return on investment, and 2.9 million graduates averaged a 10% rate of return on their degrees.
Cost is where the argument gets harder. 87% of Americans are deterred by the cost of higher education, and two decades of tuition growth explain why.
Tuition increases over 20 years
In-state public institutions saw the steepest 20-year increase at 45%, ahead of private institutions at 41% and out-of-state public at 32%.
Only 62% of students say college is preparing them for financial stability. For a family weighing a 45% tuition increase, that is the number the decision turns on — which makes career preparation the most direct answer available to a value objection.
Prioritizing career preparedness
Students are asking for career preparation out loud
Institutions rarely get demand this unambiguous. 62% of students and recent graduates want their school to offer more career preparation or career-focused courses.
Their stated reason for enrolling matches that request. Nearly as many students attend college to learn career skills as attend to obtain the credential itself.
Why students say they attend college
48% attend to get a degree, 41% to learn skills for a career, 10% for the college experience, and 1% for other reasons.
Students are also specific about who they want to hear it from — and it is not primarily the faculty.
Who students prefer to learn from
Read carefully, this is an opportunity rather than a rebuke. 73.2% preferring industry experts is a mandate for practitioner-led programming — speaker series, employer panels, alumni-taught modules — that sits alongside the curriculum instead of competing with it. It is also the cheapest form of career programming an institution can add.
Only 2.9% of students prefer to learn from masterclass celebrities and 1.5% from podcasters. Students want credible practitioners, not entertainment — which is a favorable finding for institutions with alumni networks.
Decision-making & problem-solving
The skill employers screen for first
Employers treat problem-solving as a threshold requirement: 88.3% want candidates who have it. Among undergraduates, 51.5% rank it as a critical soft skill — the widest disagreement measured in the study.
Decision-making sits inside the same competency. Employers describing problem-solving are describing a graduate who can take an ambiguous situation, choose a course of action, and defend the choice. Undergraduates who have not yet been asked to do that under real stakes tend to rank it below skills they can already demonstrate.
That reading is supported by the cohort curve. Once graduate students and recent graduates encounter workplace ambiguity, recognition jumps to 76.6% and 83.4%. Experience is what teaches the skill's importance, so the practical question for an institution is where students can encounter consequential decisions before they graduate.
Leadership programming, team-based projects with real deliverables, and internships all supply that condition. They are also the interventions this report finds most under-distributed.
Collaboration & teamwork
Collaboration has a measurable output, not just a cultural one
Teamwork improves the quality of work by 73%. That figure reframes collaboration from a soft preference into a performance requirement, which is how employers evaluate it.
Group work is common on campus; structured collaboration with accountability is less so. The distinction matters because employers do not ask candidates whether they worked in groups. They ask what the candidate contributed, how the team handled disagreement, and what changed as a result.
Students need experiences that generate those answers. Peer-accountability structures — cohorts, success teams, project groups with defined roles — produce collaboration evidence a student can actually narrate in an interview.
Communication across all mediums
Skills students hold but cannot yet describe
Communication is the skill through which every other soft skill becomes visible to an employer. A graduate who solved a hard problem and cannot explain how looks, on paper, like a graduate who did not.
The 2025 findings suggest this is where the gap is least about capability. 83.6% of undergraduates say they have learned technical and soft skills, and 87.2% feel prepared for the workplace. What employers are not receiving is the evidence.
The workplace also spreads communication across more mediums than a syllabus typically covers: asynchronous written updates, video calls, client-facing email, and presentations to people who were not in the room. Fluency in one does not transfer automatically to the others.
The return on closing this piece is durable. Graduates with strong soft skills promote 13% faster — a career-long compounding effect from a set of skills that can be coached in a semester.
Coaching articulation is materially cheaper than adding new programming, and it applies to skills students already report having.
Internships build in-demand soft skills
The most effective intervention is the least distributed
Internships are where the 2025 data is least ambiguous. Students who complete one report learning exactly the skills employers say they want.
Say they learned soft skills from an internship
The benefits extend past skills. 80% of students credit their internship for expanding their network — the mechanism by which a first job actually arrives.
Participation is the problem. Only 17.2% of undergraduates say they have participated in an internship, rising to 28.9% among graduate students and recent graduates.
That 52.5% figure is the lever. Institutional facilitation already accounts for roughly half of completed internships, which means expanding it is a known-yield intervention rather than a speculative one — and it reaches the students least able to source a placement through family or personal networks.
Administrators see the supply side differently than students see the participation side. 62.4% of administrators say their students have a lot of internship opportunities, against the 17.2% of undergraduates who have taken one.
Opportunities available and placements completed are different measures. The distance between them is the most useful thing a single campus can audit against this report.
How higher ed can better prepare students
Six moves the 2025 data supports
Each of these follows directly from a measured finding, and each is available to a Student Affairs, Student Success, or Career Services team without waiting on a curricular overhaul.
The common thread: students are not resistant. 94% say faculty and administration care about their career success, and 62% are actively asking for more career preparation. The constraint is design and capacity, not willingness.
Conclusion
A gap this specific is a gap that can be closed
The 2025 findings describe a solvable problem. One skill, one number, one distance: 88.3% of employers want problem-solving, 51.5% of undergraduates rank it critical, 36.8 percentage points apart.
Everything else in the report points to the same conclusion from a different angle. Students who intern learn the skills. Students who work in teams produce better work. Students who hear from practitioners want more of it. And students who graduate figure out on their own what mattered — 83.4% of recent graduates and administrators now name problem-solving critical, up from 51.5% among undergraduates.
The institutional opportunity is to move that recognition forward by four years, while the student is still on campus and the institution still has the tools to act.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the soft-skills gap in the State of Higher Ed 2025 report?
It is the distance between the skills students prioritize and the skills employers require. In the 2025 findings, 51.5% of undergraduates identified problem-solving as a critical soft skill while 88.3% of employers want job candidates to have problem-solving skills — a gap of 36.8 percentage points.
How many people were surveyed, and who were they?
The State of Higher Ed 2025 surveyed 3,790 respondents across four cohorts: undergraduate students, graduate students, recent graduates, and college administrators. Reporting figures by cohort is what makes the recognition curve visible, since undergraduates and recent graduates answer the same question very differently.
If 87.2% of undergraduates feel prepared for the workplace, is there really a problem?
Preparedness in the report is self-assessed. 87.2% of undergraduates feel prepared and 83.8% believe they are getting their money’s worth, but employers apply a different standard: 88.3% want problem-solving skills that only 51.5% of undergraduates rank as critical. High confidence and an unmet employer requirement are not contradictory findings — they describe a visibility problem rather than a satisfaction problem.
What does the internship data tell an administrator to prioritize?
Internships are the most effective soft-skills intervention in the data and the least distributed. 95.9% of undergraduates who interned say they learned soft skills from it and 80% credit the internship for expanding their network, yet only 17.2% of undergraduates have participated in one. Because 52.5% of degree-earners who interned had help from their college or university, expanding institutional facilitation is the most direct lever available.
Do administrators see the same internship picture students describe?
Not entirely. 62.4% of administrators say their students have a lot of internship opportunities, while only 17.2% of undergraduates report having participated in one. Available opportunities and completed placements are different measures, and the distance between them is worth auditing on any individual campus.
Sources & methodology
How this study was conducted
The State of Higher Ed 2025 surveyed 3,790 respondents across four cohorts — undergraduate students, graduate students, recent graduates, and college administrators — on the relationship between higher education and employment outcomes. Reporting by cohort is what makes the recognition curve in this report visible.
Every figure on this page comes from the NSLS's published 2025 findings. Percentages are reproduced at the precision the source reports them; where the source reports a whole number, this page does not add decimal places.
- The State of Higher Ed 2025 — the NSLS. nsls.org/blog/the-state-of-higher-ed-2025 Primary source for all survey figures, cohort breakdowns, and the cited third-party statistics on ROI, tuition growth, teamwork, and promotion velocity.
Year-over-year comparisons with the 2026 edition are directional: the cohorts and sample sizes differ, and the 2026 study added recruiters as a fifth cohort.
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