Handshake: The Algorithmic Auction Block for Your Degree

You probably didn’t notice when the plastic booths and stale coffee of the university career fair disappeared. They were replaced by a sleek blue interface, a friendly notification bell, and a promise: democratization. Handshake, the platform now ubiquitous on over 1,400 campuses, pitched itself as the great equalizer. No longer did you need to be at an Ivy League school to get noticed by Goldman Sachs; you just needed a profile.

It sounds noble. (Tech pitches always do.) But look closer at the mechanism, and the fairy tale dissolves into something far more cynical.

Handshake hasn’t just digitized recruitment; it has financialized the student body. In this new ecosystem, the university career center—once a sanctuary for guidance—has been reduced to a data funnel, and the debt-laden student is no longer a scholar seeking a vocation. They are a row in a database, optimized for high-frequency trading.

The genius of Handshake wasn't building a better job board. It was convincing universities to pay for the privilege of handing over their students' data to a third-party broker.

The Trojan Horse of "Efficiency"

For decades, campus recruiting was inefficient, local, and deeply human. It relied on relationships between a career office director and a few dozen recruiters. It was flawed, certainly. It was biased toward target schools, absolutely. But it was not a volume game.

Handshake walked in with a tantalizing offer for cash-strapped universities: We will manage your employer relations for you. The software is slick. It handles appointments, internships, and fair management. Universities signed up in droves, effectively outsourcing the gatekeeping of their own graduates.

Here is where the model gets murky. While universities pay subscription fees to use the platform, the real revenue growth engine lies with the employers. The "Premium" tier allows companies to filter, target, and message students with granular precision. It transforms the student population into a searchable inventory.

The Noise Machine

Ask a senior in the Class of 2025 about their experience, and you won't hear about "connections." You will hear about the void. The ease of application—the "one-click" dopamine hit—has created a hyper-inflation of applications. When everyone can apply to everything, the value of a single application drops to near zero.

This isn't an accident; it's a feature. Platforms thrive on engagement metrics. A student applying to 50 jobs looks like "high engagement" to investors. To the student, it feels like shouting into a hurricane. Recent data suggests internship applications are up 41% year-over-year, yet availability is down. The platform has created a perfect storm of anxiety, where the only strategy is to spam your résumé to as many portals as possible.

And what happens to that résumé? It feeds "Handshake AI." Your desperate attempts to find an entry-level role are training the very models that might automate that role out of existence in five years. The irony is suffocating.

The Illusion of Meritocracy

The most dangerous myth Handshake peddles is that technology is neutral. It is not. Algorithms are simply opinions embedded in code. When a premium employer sets a filter for "GPA > 3.8" and "Computer Science Major," the system ruthlessly hides the struggling student with a brilliant portfolio or the late bloomer with grit.

In the old world, a recruiter might have stumbled upon that student by accident at a booth, charmed by a conversation. In the Handshake world, that student effectively does not exist. They are filtered out before the page even loads.

We have traded the flawed, biased judgment of humans for the ruthless, scalable bias of machines. And we did it all while telling a generation of students drowning in loan debt that this was for their own good.