National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)

History and Background

The National Association of Colleges and Employers is a nonprofit organization that promotes the employment of college graduates in the United States.  ¹

Its members and primary stakeholders are recruiting and human-resources professionals at organizations that hire recent graduates of undergraduate and advanced-degree programs, and career services professionals and other administrators at colleges and universities that produce such graduates.  ⁴

It also offers membership to other individuals and companies involved in the recruiting process, such as consultants or software providers. ⁵

As of 2026, NACE claimed more than 17,000 members, with membership pricing ranging between $485/year for individuals to $5,800/year for institutions with 26 or more NACE members. ⁵

Leadership

National Association of Colleges and Employers’s board is divided into representatives of colleges and representatives of employers. ⁴ As of 2025, its board chair was J. Cedric Blocker, corporate vice president and head of programmatic recruitment at New York Life.  ⁴

As of 2025, its chair-elect was Nicole Hall, senior associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students at the University of Virginia.  ⁴

Research Reports and Policy Advocacy

National Association of Colleges and Employers regularly surveys its members to compile reports on salaries, recruiting, internships, recruiting compensation, benchmarks, and other trends that are available to NACE member institutions. ²

It also performs annual public surveys on post-graduation destinations for college graduates and semiannual job outlook surveys, as well as occasional research on other workforce and employment topics. ²

Gender Pay Gap Research

NACE began collecting employment data by sex in 2020. As of 2025, it was promulgating the view that there is a pay gap among early-career college graduates, with women earning 78 percent to 80 percent of men’s earnings. ⁶

A May 2025 NACE report by Mary Gatta and Sasha Patil asserted, “Systemic gender inequality is a stubborn feature of our labor market.” ⁶ They attributed the differences in part to “occupational sex segregation,” noting that women are more commonly employed in lower-paying industries and roles than men, with roughly three-quarters of male recent graduates employed in private-sector corporate roles while more women than men found roles in nonprofit institutions or state and local governments. ⁶

Promotion of DEI

NACE offers a free Career Readiness toolkit for students on its website, in which it identifies eight “career readiness competencies” that it claims are “quite simply, the new career currency.” ⁷

In addition to capabilities of career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology, NACE promotes “Equity & Inclusion” as a competency.  ⁷

It claims that to be “career-ready,” graduates must be able to “Engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.”  ⁷ Some of the sample behaviors it encourages include “Advocate for inclusion, equitable practices, justice, and empowerment for historically marginalized communities” and “Address systems of privilege that limit opportunities for members of historically marginalized communities.”  ⁷

In a November 2025 column published by Inside Higher Ed, Villanova University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences associate director for academic advising Andrew J. Bove criticized NACE’s implicit message that “If you’re not a supporter of the progressive DEI agenda, you’re not career ready.” ⁸

“NACE could be teaching students how to navigate the political diversity that characterizes most workplaces,” Bove wrote. “Instead, through its influence in the college career counseling world, it is teaching them that acceptance of progressive orthodoxy on disputed questions of racial justice is a prerequisite for professional employment.” ⁸

As of the spring of 2026, NACE’s website noted that “the E&I competency is currently under review,” explaining that “Recent federal Executive Orders and subsequent guidance, as well as court decisions and regulatory changes, may create legal risks that either preclude or discourage campuses and employers from using it.”  ⁷