Career outcomes for many are on pause or delayed. For example, some kids do Peace Corps, or Americorps, or Teach for America which are not directly related to their eventual careers. And are not exactly high paying.
Some students do a sort of glide year while they prepare to apply to medical or law school. They might have lower paying jobs and again, just tangentially related to their eventual careers.
Many people change careers multiple times. New careers develop that weren’t even in existence when these kids were in high school.
Our goal was for our kids to attend college where they would get a strong and broad education (which is why we supported a strong core curriculum).
This is a good point. Adding that in surveys like this people can lie…there is no check of the veracity of what is reported. The reaction/pressure is to report a high salary, a high sign on bonus, etc. Some schools might spot check some data, but I don’t know any school that verifies all the inputs.
College Scorecard’s numbers use the IRS W-2 and SE earnings of those working and not in school who received federal financial aid. Among those working, this could result in a low bias because those who received federal financial aid are less likely to be well connected with the associated benefits of getting higher paying jobs. It also means that the people are not lying unless they are lying to the IRS on their SE earnings.
Of course, all reports using earnings of those working are biased high compared to if unemployed persons were included and counted as having zero earnings when calculating the median or mean. (But note that many reports do mention the percentage seeking employment.)
Reports using the mean will commonly have higher numbers than those using the median, since a small number of very highly paid people can skew the mean much more than the median.
How would they gain access to this data especially after a student has finished college? College “outcomes” are what the kid did after college. I don’t know a single person who would turn their W2 over to College Scorecard. Is this a common practice?
And if they used the W2 forms for my kids while they were IN college, let’s just say, their incomes would have been pretty low. And their jobs were not directly related, if at all, to their eventual careers.
Probably through FAFSA consent and approval for DoE to access IRS information. Note that W-2 forms are sent directly to the IRS as well as the taxpayer.
They use data for those working and not in school.
But aren’t these sent to recent grads who may or may not even have many, if any, pay stubs when they are asked to respond to outcome surveys? And if we are talking specifically about college scorecard, if it is going by tax info, how would it have info on the field the job is in? And for many, what they majored in may not correlate with the job they get/career they enter. So that would be confounding.
I never had a college suggest we view this data. Our HS counselors never suggested we view this data. Actually…no one I know suggested we use this data.
Ditto. Never heard this mentioned in any of our kids’ HS college prep meetings, at any college fair or at any school visits. And… the point of the information provided in the conversation.com article, the hechinger report and the Georgetown CEW reports is that these data can be deeply flawed. Just because people are silly enough to pay attention to USnews rankings doesn’t make them “right” either. The point of this thread is that people need to take that “data” with a very large grain of salt. Just because people supposedly look at it doesn’t mean it’s meaningful information.
It is probably not very commonly used, as evidenced by common notions about how some highly specialized majors are believed to have better job prospects than they actually do have, or that all STEM majors lead to well paid jobs after graduation.
They do sort by “field”, IIRC, but otherwise the numbers would be meaningless, if they lobbed in the salary of a receptionist with that of a first year Mechanical Engineer.
So what the major is that is listed may have little if anything to do with what their first year income is and job they acquire.
When I was in grad school, I had a low paying USPHS traineeship. It was wonderful in that it helped pay expenses during my first few years in grad school, but that “salary” would have been reported while I was in grad school and it was pretty low! I can’t recall how much it was, but it was probably barely enough to live on as a starving graduate student.
Do you feel it is meaningful data, if they combine the information of a person who may have majored in economics or business or what have you, but is working in a modestly paying job for a few years before applying to a top MBA program with someone who majored in CS or engineering and got a high paying job, or one who majored in engineering but then took a job with a company where their job was to evaluate what kind of contractors a company might need to hire (I am paraphrasing, but one of my engineer sons briefly considered a position something like that, but I cant recall the details).