After almost a year since Augustana implemented a center devoted to career development, statistics show CORE is being utilized by the majority of the student body.
“We have a 98 percent referral rate,” said Edmondson. “You couldn’t ask for better than that. It’s incredible.”
CORE gets this referral rate from surveys asking if students who use CORE would refer it to a friend.
When explaining the 2 percent of students who wouldn’t recommend CORE, Edmondson said, “of course you’ll always have some students rate unhappy. Some students come in here and may not like the options that we give them,” Edmondson said.
There have been over 100 students per week that visit the CORE offices, and according to CORE records, over 2000 students have visited CORE this year.
Many Augustana students like sophomore Chris Sauer visit CORE for help receiving internships and jobs.
“They really helped me improve my resume and did a great job,” Sauer said.
Students of all majors visit CORE: 58 percent of the 2,000 students that visit are in non-business related majors, while 27 percent of business related majors and 16 percent of undecided majors visit as well.
Seniors visit the CORE office the most with 228 students, followed by the juniors with 221, sophomores with 180, and 155 first-years.
Greek life is also fairly represented in their numbers at  CORE. According to CORE documents, CORE has had students from every Greek chapter at Augustana. The Beta Omega Sigma fraternity has the highest attendance percentage of any Greek chapter.
One reason CORE may be popular among students could be that the career center was moved from Sorensen to Olin at the beginning of this year, Edmondson said. But there are also areas of improvement for increasing students numbers.
“We need to work on having students understand the value of CORE,” Edmondson said. “We also need to work on getting students to come to Olin because for some students, it’s convenient to come to CORE since they have classes in Olin. You have music students who spend their time in Bergendoff and won’t come to Olin since they don’t have classes here.”
When asked about the high number of emails that CORE sends out, Edmondson said, “These emails are the most efficient ways of getting information out. If students don’t like them, they can just read it and move on. But one of those emails may interest a student and it may be from one that has been sent out multiple times. So it’s a catch-22 when people are angry about all the emails, but one of these emails could help a student.”
Another reason there are many emails is due to the 20 offices that are a part of CORE. Because all of these offices are trying to get information out to students, each sends many emails under the CORE name.
Edmondson also talked about possible text message notifications, where students can volunteer to have CORE send them notifications via phone. Edmondson said that wouldn’t be happening until a year or two from now, though.