Executive Summary

Finding Their Next: Career & Transfer Outcomes (2026) is Dallas College’s second annual look at where graduates go, what they earn, and how they rise after completing a credential. It draws on the First Destination Survey, which asks graduating students about their plans in the months around commencement. This year, 2,392 members of the Class of 2026 responded, a 33% response rate, up from 14% a year ago, giving the College its clearest picture yet of graduates’ next steps and its first true year-over-year comparison. The Class of 2026 is entering a Dallas-Fort Worth economy that is still growing but hesitant to hire, with Dallas County unemployment above the national rate, a rising cost of living, and early signs that artificial intelligence is affecting career entrants. Against that backdrop, this year’s survey results are steady and, in places, encouraging.

 

Key findings include:

• Graduates know their next step. About 85% of respondents have a plan: 41% will pursue further education, 26% will work, 17% will do both, and 2% are pursuing other opportunities such as military service. Only 15% are still seeking or undecided, and 183 of them asked to connect with career and transfer pathways teams through the survey itself.
• Satisfaction increased. Agreement that an education at Dallas College was worth the cost, prepared graduates for what is next, and helped them meet their goals improved slightly across the board from 2025. Coursework and relationships with faculty and success coaches were again the most valued parts of students’ overall experience; internships and work-based learning ranked lower, largely because fewer students had access to them.
• Dallas College is its own top transfer destination. Of 1,379 graduates who stated they were continuing their education, most are traditional-age students headed to public Texas universities to earn a bachelor’s degree, but nearly one in four plan to re-enroll at Dallas College, and about half of those intend to earn a Dallas College bachelor’s degree. The 103 baccalaureate graduates in the survey reported the strongest outcomes of any group: most earn more than $60,000 and 73% got a promotion or raise as a result of their degree.
• Earnings hover at the living wage line. Graduates working full-time earn about $50,000 on average, just above the $48,485 a single adult needs to cover basic needs in Dallas County. Adult learners (25 and older) averaged nearly $57,000, up $3,000 from last year, while traditional-age graduates averaged about $42,000, down $1,000, consistent with a market that is hiring fewer early-career workers. One in three graduates plan to work more than one job, suggesting that affordability and economic security remain salient issues for students even as they become graduates.
• Alignment pays. Graduates working in jobs related to their program of study earn roughly $9,500 more than those whose jobs are unrelated. Earnings and alignment vary by school. For example, School of Education graduates report the highest alignment but average earnings just below a living wage, while School of Engineering, Technology, Mathematics, and Sciences graduates earn above a living wage in jobs largely unrelated to their studies.
• Graduates praise people and flag processes. More than 500 graduates wrote in with open-ended feedback. Their appreciation praised faculty, success coaches, and hands-on courses; their frustrations flagged financial aid errors, inconsistent coaching, transfer guidance, and technology systems: operational frictions rather than quality of education.

 

The recommendations that follow build on these findings. Dallas College should:

1. Turn the First Destination Survey from a snapshot into a system, further embedding it in the graduation process, linking it to other data sources, and routing every request for help.
2. Adopt a Dallas County living wage as the College’s shared standard for post-college success, reach consensus on measurement, and track it as a key performance indicator.
3. Close early-career gaps by scaling work-based learning, deepening employer partnerships that pay living wages, and growing bachelor’s programs where outcomes are strongest.
4. Fix the frictions graduates named in financial aid, success coaching, transfer advising, and student-facing systems. Graduates like our people but are often stymied by our processes.

Two years of data now show that Dallas College graduates leave knowing where they are going, satisfied with what they received, and, for many, stepping into work that sustains them. The task ahead is to make that true for more of them so that every graduate can find their next.

Visit the Dashboard to Explore More

A companion dashboard accompanying this report allows readers to explore even more findings. 

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