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Students choose your institution believing their degree will open doors.
A well-designed career ecosystem turns that hope into real opportunity.
Students choose your institution believing their degree will open doors.
A well-designed career ecosystem turns that hope into real opportunity.
Our Approach
Our Approach
Career preparation has become one of the most important ways universities demonstrate the value of a degree. Yet on many campuses, the work that prepares students for life after graduation is fragmented—spread across academic departments, career centers, internships, alumni engagement, and employer partnerships.
Our work focuses on helping institutions bring these efforts into alignment.
Rather than adding more programs, we help university leaders understand how career preparation currently functions across campus and design the structures needed to support it more effectively.
- Understand the career ecosystem
Every institution already has a career ecosystem—a network of programs, relationships, and learning experiences that shape how students prepare for life after college.
We begin by examining how that ecosystem actually operates: where students gain experience, how different units coordinate their efforts, and where gaps or duplication exist.
2. Clarify leadership and coordination
2. Clarify leadership and coordination
Career preparation often sits everywhere and nowhere at once. Progress becomes difficult when responsibility and decision-making are unclear.
We work with leadership teams to define roles, strengthen governance, and create clear pathways for collaboration across academic and student affairs.
3. Design an intentional system
3. Design an intentional system
Strong career preparation is not built through isolated initiatives. It emerges from a coordinated system that connects the classroom, experiential learning, employer and alumni relationships, and career advising.
Together, we design structures that make those connections intentional and scalable.
4. Move from vision to execution
4. Move from vision to execution
Most campuses already have ideas about how to strengthen career preparation. The challenge is turning those ideas into action.
We help institutions build practical execution roadmaps that identify priorities, sequence initiatives, and create accountability for implementation.
The Result
When career preparation is fragmented, opportunity often depends on chance—who a student knows, which class they happen to take, or whether they find the right support at the right moment.
When it functions as a coordinated ecosystem, the experience changes.
Students gain more than advice: they gain access to experiences, relationships, and opportunities that shape their futures. Faculty and staff see how their work contributes to something larger, and leaders can stand behind a clear promise: that a student’s education will open real doors after graduation.
Rebekah Paré
Rebekah Paré
Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
"The most effective institutions don’t treat career preparation as an add-on. They design the student experience so opportunity is built into it."
"The most effective institutions don’t treat career preparation as an add-on. They design the student experience so opportunity is built into it."
Meet Rebekah
Meet Rebekah
Rebekah Paré is a higher education strategist who helps university leaders strengthen career preparation at a moment when the stakes for student outcomes—and institutional credibility—have never been higher. As competition for students intensifies and scrutiny of career outcomes grows, institutions are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that a degree leads to real opportunity.
With more than 20 years of experience working inside higher education—including senior leadership roles at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin–Madison—Rebekah partners with presidents, provosts, and senior leadership teams to assess the career ecosystem on their campuses and design the structures needed to support student success after graduation.
Her work focuses on aligning governance, strengthening coordination across academic and student affairs, and building execution roadmaps that move career preparation from institutional priority to institutional performance.
Rebekah’s consulting practice spans more than 50 institutions in the United States and internationally, including the University of Michigan, Louisiana State University, Skidmore College, St. Lawrence University, and the University of Oregon. Her projects help institutions clarify responsibility for career preparation, scale experiential learning, integrate career competencies, and connect career outcomes more directly to enrollment strategy, retention, and long-term student success.
Before founding Paré Consulting, Rebekah served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Career Education and Development at Washington University in St. Louis and as Associate Dean for SuccessWorks in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she helped build one of the most recognized career initiatives in the liberal arts.
Rebekah holds a BA in German and Piano Performance from the University of New Hampshire and completed her doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Music History and German Literature. Her work has been featured in NPR, Money.com, Inside Higher Ed, HigherEdJobs, and The evoLLLution, and she has presented or delivered keynotes for organizations including the National Association of Colleges and Employers, Student Success.US, and Hire Big Ten+.
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“As a newly appointed president, I wanted to prioritize career readiness. Rebekah delivered an outstanding analysis of our career services, benchmarked against peers, and gave us a clear sense of where we stand. Her proposal went far beyond a typical strategy—it offered a bold, student-centered model that will shape our direction moving forward.”
“As a newly appointed president, I wanted to prioritize career readiness. Rebekah delivered an outstanding analysis of our career services, benchmarked against peers, and gave us a clear sense of where we stand. Her proposal went far beyond a typical strategy—it offered a bold, student-centered model that will shape our direction moving forward.”
President John Karl Scholz, University of Oregon
President John Karl Scholz, University of Oregon
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