Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Curtis LaClaire · Nextstep · August 2026
Here is the map. Your product has two buyers who do not share a budget: the student who uses it, and the institution that can pay for everyone at once. This covers the second kind across the United States, who signs inside each type of institution, which segments they sit in and roughly how many there are.
Private nonprofit four-year colleges
The shortest decision chain on this page. Career offices here are often one or two people carrying the whole outcomes number, so a tool that does work a headcount would otherwise do is an easy case to make. Small enough that a provost or a president can settle it inside one meeting.
Who signs: executive director of career services, dean of students, vice president for student success, provost.
1,500 to 1,750
US private nonprofit four-year institutions
Public four-year universities
Bigger budgets, more seats, and a longer path to a signature. Career services usually sits under student affairs while the contract runs through procurement and often through the technology office as well, so the person who wants it and the person who signs it are rarely the same person.
Who signs: executive director of career services, associate provost for student success, director of academic technology, procurement lead.
700 to 800
US public four-year institutions
Community and technical colleges
The segment where placement is the funded mission rather than a good number in the annual report. Workforce outcomes are reported to the state, often against grant conditions, so there is usually a named person whose job depends on the metric your product moves.
Who signs: dean of workforce development, director of career and transfer services, grant program directors, vice president of student services.
900 to 1,050
US public two-year and community colleges
Career, technical and proprietary institutions
Placement rate here is a disclosure rather than a talking point, which makes outcomes tooling a compliance line as much as a student service. Counts in this band move a lot, because closures, mergers and how branch campuses are counted all pull the number around. Banded wide on purpose.
Who signs: campus president, director of career services, compliance or accreditation lead, chief operating officer.
1,300 to 1,800
US career, technical and for-profit institutions; definitions vary by source
Public school districts
The layer below the one you are built for, and the one that reaches students before they choose. College and career readiness is a funded mandate in most states. Long buying calendars, but the seat counts are large and renewals are routine once a district is in.
Who signs: director of college and career readiness, career and technical education director, curriculum director, superintendent.
13,000 to 13,500
US public school districts, covering roughly 24,000 public high schools
Workforce boards and state agencies
Small by count and unusually sticky. Publicly funded, so the route in is a formal solicitation rather than a demo, and the cycle is slow. Once inside, these contracts renew and they carry a reference weight that opens the college segments above.
Who signs: workforce board executive director, program manager, state workforce agency lead.
550 to 600
local workforce development boards across the US
The employer side
The third buyer, and the one nobody can list. Early-career recruiting sits with talent acquisition at some employers, with campus relations at others, and with a rotating program manager at the rest. There is no register of who owns it, which is exactly why the group stays underworked by everyone selling into it.
Who signs: head of early careers, campus recruiting lead, talent acquisition director, university relations manager.
No public register
identified one employer at a time; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
Your user and your payer are never on the same list. A student signs up and tells you nothing about who could authorize campus-wide access. In this category self-serve use builds inside institutions that have no idea they are customers, and it rarely surfaces the one person who can turn that into a seat license. Two different audiences, and only one of them arrives on its own.
2
This sector buys on a calendar, not on a need. Budgets set in the spring, decisions land before the fall term, and a solicitation that misses the window waits a year. A channel built on named roles can arrive inside the window on purpose. Traffic that finds you on its own arrives whenever it happens to arrive.
3
The private nonprofit band is the least worked segment on this page. Between 1,500 and 1,750 institutions, small career offices, no procurement gauntlet, and few sellers going after them properly because individually they look too small to chase. Reached at scale, that is one of the largest openings here.
4
The seat turns over and the stack reopens. A new director of career services almost always reviews what was bought before they arrived. Those moves are visible from outside if someone is watching several thousand institutions for them. That is mechanical work, and at most companies this size it is the work that never gets a turn.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. Institution counts shift with closures, mergers and how branch campuses are counted, so these figures indicate scale rather than an exact roll. Sector definitions vary between sources, which is why the career and proprietary band is banded wider than the rest. Who owns early-career recruiting inside an employer is not recorded anywhere public and is described here rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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