We are in decision crunch time. One of the schools still in consideration is Furman. I follow a parent group on FB and someone asked what the plans were for this year’s graduates - a decisive majority said their students were continuing on to graduate school. This got me wondering if I could find that stat for various schools. I don’t think it’s on the common data set - just the percentage that are employed OR enrolled in grad school. Does anyone know where this exact statistic is tracked?
My line of thinking is: my daughter would likely end up at Furman because it’s the best low-cost option for her. BUT, if she’s pretty much going to “have” to go to grad school after, then in the long run the cost may end up more than a couple of her higher priced options where she is more likely to be hired straight out of undergrad.
“First destination” is the term I needed to be able to search this out - thank you!
Agree for the most part, but I do feel that some schools are more focused on preparing the student for further studies while others push a more practical hands-on version of the same major, the focus leaning more towards preparing them for the workforce.
I may be up too late, but i am missing the logic. Are you thinking that the graduating Furman students couldn’t get jobs and that’s why they ‘had’ to go to grad school, and that attending a more vocationally oriented college might have enabled them to get jobs?
Your daughter will only “have” to go to grad school after UG if a PG degree is an important career step- such as a qualification (eg law, medicine/health, engineering) or a career marker (many teaching roles and public policy/IR roles want a Masters around 3-5 years after graduation). If it is an important part of a career, no amount of school-focus is going to change that.
I think you might be putting too much weight on the experience of self-selected group that I struggle to believe represents more than a small % of the class.
The ravages of the pandemic may also be affecting the % staying in school.
True, the Northeastern co-op program is explicitly aimed at giving students substantial work experience, but it is something of an outlier, and after that you run right into @momofboiler1’s point: the variable is more the major than the school. I have been thinking of the general-purpose colleges (leaving aside directional & tech colleges) that I know best (where I have studied or taught), and I really don’t see that difference. However, I regularly get corrected on CC, so if you have examples in mind I would be interested to hear them!
A student may decide to go to a grad school for a number of reasons (some have been mentioned upthread):
The field in which the student wants to pursue a career practically requires it;
A professional degree (e.g. MBA) that the student believes may enhance her/his career;
The student wants to switch to a different (often adjacent) field;
The student is more intellectually curious about a subject matter (e.g. s/he wants to better understand the why’s, not just the how’s). Some schools may have more such students than others.
I have known students from several schools with excellent job placement (Duke, Georgetown, Colby) who have done a one year masters after their 4th year. Reasons include: seeking government position and pay scale is linked to degree and wanting to add another complementary skill set to their UG degree. None have done it because they couldn’t find jobs.
I don’t see an answer to the original question., About 4M people graduate college annually, and about 500K enter graduate school. So around 1 in 8. Could it be 1 in 6 or 1 in 10? Sure. But it isn’t 1 in 2 or 1 in 100.
I’m surprised that we produced so many PhDs. I didn’t know PhDs in “Parks, recreation, leisure, fitness, and kinesiology” even existed. We produced 349 of them in 2020 (from just 2 in 1971). We also produced more PhDs in education than in engineering. No wonder we have issues with too much educational debt and too many school administrators making education too costly for everyone else.
I was also surprised to see this Doctoral level data, I had never pulled it before.
There’s another thread with anecdotes of sports management undergrads struggling to get decent jobs and pay off their student debt. Can’t even imagine what options a Parks and Rec PhD (to take one example) has that could justify all of those years of sub-standard earnings while in school. I also wonder if any of those could possibly be fully funded PhDs…I really doubt it, people are likely paying a lot and/or taking debt.
Yes, it’s no secret that there are too many PhDs and not enough jobs, particularly in academia. Partly this is because tenure-track positions often open up only when professors die or retire, and senior scholars have been increasingly reluctant to retire, not least because they’ve been immune from mandatory retirement since the mid-1990s.
It’s worth noting that job prospects for PhD students vary not only between fields but also universities. Someone with a PhD in history from Yale or Chicago is much, much more likely to get a job in academia than someone with a history PhD from, say, USF or Texas Tech.
Clearly. There’re many threads discussing poor outcomes of undergraduate majors, particularly at non-elite schools, but very few on the poor outcomes of PhD programs at less-than-well-regarded schools in those fields.
Postsecondary Teachers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that there are approximately 1,276,900 post-secondary teachers now, with growth of 156,700 from 2020-2030. If 1/40 of the current ones retire per year, plus the projected job growth per year, we get 47,593 new hires per year. However, this is likely optimistic, since some of those are part time adjunct jobs. But that means that 73,215 per year is a large oversupply, particularly for the subset of job openings that are the more desirable ones (tenure-track).
Remember that many folks also complete graduate degrees years after undergrad…and those might NOT be reflected in the stats you read.
I got my masters three years after my bachelors. I don’t think I ever reported that advanced degree to my undergrad school. Note…a masters is required in my field as the entry level degree. I also did post masters work but that was probably 15 years after I got my masters.