The national universities producing the top earners are no surprise: Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford and others that routinely top the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. The most troubling numbers show up far beneath the upper echelons of higher education. Elite institutions prop up the overall average earnings of college graduates nationwide. Although earnings of college graduates continue to outpace those of non-collegians by a significant margin, at some institutions, the earnings of students 10 years after enrollment are bleak.
The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
It is little wonder that these are the schools with high loan default rates among their graduates.
I don’t believe the cost of living is reflected in the salary info.
For example:
A salary of $35K/year in Rio Rancho NM is the equivalent of:
$37.8K in Atlanta
$38.2K in Cleveland
$47.4K in Portland OR
$52.2K in Boston
$57K in San Jose CA http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/
That may be true, but for a private college, it’s default rate is fairly low (3.2%).
The challenge is that it’s never an apples to apples comparison.
As we know, even UCLA VS. PSU is not an apples to apples comparison. For a family earning between $30K to $48K a year (using this range as it reflects who may be getting federal aid), Net Cost at PSU is $20,750 a year, while it’s only $9,520 a year at UCLA. PSU is simply more expensive (and offers less financial aid) than UCLA. Clearly, if you’re in-state in CA, UCLA is the better choice! But if you’re an in-state student in Pennsylvania, UCLA isn’t the “affordable” option.
It may be a superficially apples-to-apples comparison for in-state students for each school. What it really says is that CA is a lot more friendly than PA in terms of financial aid for lower to middle income in-state students. Lower to middle income students in PA may not have very good college options from a financial standpoint, since even the PASSHE schools tend to leave graduates with relatively high levels of student loan debt, while being relatively limited in academic offerings (e.g. it is hard to find engineering at the PASSHE schools).
“At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year.”
Yeah, because they’re happy doing macrame in their yurts. Artsy-alternative schools aren’t great illustrations of this phenomenon. Everybody at Bennington and Bard is shaking their heads over the lost souls trying to measure success with money.
A lot of earnings is about drives. And a lot of driven kids are not going to barber school, “just” collecting online credits for a degree, or there to indulge vague interests. Among art majors, eg, there are those who “like to draw” versus those with a plan that takes them out into the world of financial opportunities.
And for every Bennington graduate like Tartt or Ellis, there is my young cousin who travels with a theater troupe, perfectly happy crashing on various couches. Making it big might be nice, but I don’t think that is the point for them. They are absolutely fine with the here and now. They still have plenty of drive.
I would look carefully at the methodology of the study before accepting that the results suggest doomsday. For instance, who was included in the survey? Did they mix people who have been steadily employed with those who elect not to be employed, perhaps opting to stay at home and care for children? While you might think that such a variable would be evenly distributed across schools, I’m sure it isn’t. I have not evaluated the method of this particular survey but suspect it is filled with confounds. Bad data in means bad validity of findings.
@alh - Nothing wrong with being in a travelling theater troupe, but there is little need to spend $48,000 a year in tuition plus room and board that Bennington wants to learn how to that. I doubt that the results of many casting calls are based on the undergraduate college one went to. In fact, doing so is counterproductive as the need to repay loans will drive people from legitimate theater into trying to find legitimate jobs.
She has no debt. Her parents were happy to pay for her college. They, and she, think it was worth it. They think that particular school was worth it. It has nothing to do with job training or cost benefit analysis. For sure, it is a luxury to be in that situation.
We are back to the difference in opinion as to the purpose of a college education.
adding: Does anyone know a student from Bennington or Bard whose main goal was money making? People self-select for that sort of school. I believe that was Hanna’s point.
@alh - I see no problem with someone going to Bennington and spending $240,000 to become a starving actor, if they or their family can afford it and they go into it with the realization that earning long-term success in the acting field is akin to standing in the rain hoping to get hit by lightning multiple times.
Unfortunately, I have known numerous people who had active active careers in their 20’s be unable to sustain their success into their 30’s and end up taking low paying jobs just to make ends meet. One friend of mine was excited that a play he was a minor character in made it to Broadway. He divorced his wife and moved to New York expecting his career to take off. Ten years later, it turns out that one play was the high point of his life. I have met numerous people that had active stage careers right after school, and they slowly died down and became secretaries or administrative assistants.
Frankly, if my kid wanted to go into acting, I would pay to have them live for 24 months in LA, and go all out to casting calls (hard to do with regular job). If at the end of the 24 months lightning hadn’t struck, then it was time to go college for a real major.
zinhead: How you think about it is different than how some think about it. Some think the education is worth it, in and of itself, regardless of whether it leads to employment and even if it costs a fortune. That is absolutely a position of privilege… Some think an educated person will find a way to support herself without being on a job training track. Since my kids have jobs that didn’t even exist when they began college, I think it is very complicated trying to plan the future. Education is really valuable to my family and friends. It is the biggest gift we are able to give our kids. We hope they can support themselves, but we will never wish we had spent that money another way. Of course, the money does have to exist.
“Paying for the Party” was about students ill served by their spending on college. They were at a school very different from Bennington. I doubt it was ever even on their radar.
The NYT should have been more careful with its generalizations—the College Scorecard data only includes salary data for graduates who received federal financial aid, which is a pretty good proportion at some but definitely not all schools, so the samples from school to school aren’t even comparable, let alone the sampling being representative across the entire population.
Also, since it looks at earnings ten years out, it (IMO unfairly) penalizes schools that send a high proportion of their students into things like PhD programs (e.g., Reed, Grinnell) or the Peace Corps (e.g., Carleton, Macalester), since those students have delayed their entry into the workforce. Once again, the NYT should have been more careful about its generalizations.
when you go to college unless your family is super rich…
you can not take basket weaving majors that are easy and have no value and expect to graduate and do anything more than work at a coffee shop. it is just reality.
Are literature, history, art history and philosophy majors equal to basket weaving majors in your mind? Because I know young people with BAs in those majors and not working in coffee shops.
However, they come from privileged environments. They aren’t from backgrounds like the students in “Paying for the Party” that had difficulty finding appropriate jobs. Those students were unemployed or underemployed after deliberately choosing majors to increase employment options.
A close family member graduated from a not-very-selective LAC with an art degree. He’s been an executive with several fashion design companies for a few decades now. He is NOT from a privileged environment, he worked his way up from retail sales to windows to display manager to first VP gig within about 15 years of graduation.
Honestly the basket weaving/art major comments on this site get old.
^^I certainly didn’t mean to imply only those from privileged backgrounds find employment with “basket weaving” majors.
I am just trying to think about examples of which I have first hand knowledge. Until I read “Paying for the Party” I had always assumed smart college grads got decent jobs.