Absolutely! And location of employment too. Some schools’ graduates stay clustered in the general area and others have a much more diverse spread. That seems to mimic the instate/out of state ratio some.
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True. But again it’s limited to who responds. And in smaller schools, what’s interesting is that not uncommonly a large employer of the recent graduates happens to be the school itself
Thankfully many schools report the percentage of participation/responders to their first destination survey, otherwise I agree that the data would be meaningless.
IMO, what’s becoming more important as the job market tightens is the strength of the alumni network, the university ties to industry, and career fairs. I know some people dismiss the career fairs part but it’s a much different experience to stand face to face with a recruiter than applying on line for hundreds of positions. D’s sophomore year in '19 (which I know is like a lifetime in the rapidly changing job market) she talked to 7 companies for an out of co-op summer internship and got 5 offers all within a week of meeting with the recruiters on campus. Present day, her company gives offers within 24-48 hrs of the on campus interviews because the recruiting team makes the decisions on the spot. They fill almost 100% of their open positions in person. Her company is not unique in having feeder schools regardless of the posting being online or not.
That part of the equation can’t really be parsed out from outcome reports. That’s different school research ; )
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I think that we are in a period of unprecedented uncertainty about which careers will grow and how. Everything will morph. So I’m not at all sure how to get value out of surveys of career outcomes.
A decade ago, ShawSon was getting a grad degree in computational and mathematical engineering as well as an MBA. As I wrote in another thread, he said that the wealth was going to be concentrated and flow to A) folks creating productivity-enhancing applications; B) the folks directing the capital to those applications; and C) the folks with the capital investing in them. He said that in rational political system would be looking to redistribute so that the folks losing their jobs (or doing unfulfilling menial work) would minimally not start a revolution and more happily find a fulfilling way to spend their lives. But, he thought that in the US, redistribution was highly unlikely until the revolt was imminent. So, his conclusion was that he (and anyone rational) should only go into jobs categories A and B or be lucky enough to part of Group C (note that folks in A and B can migrate to C). He also thought that as AI became useful in creating all kinds of things, the market would place much higher value on people who made things with their hands that would be hard to replace with AI, which included both areas like plumbing but also areas like fine art.
If you started with that thesis, is there something in career outcome surveys that would help?
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A poorly understood phenomenon (on CC and among those who obsess about outcome reports) is that some colleges do a fantastic job of helping their students pivot during an economic downturn or fundamental shift- and others do not.
Does a Career Services operation have someone who specializes in Fellowship/Foundation/Not-for-profit? These are usually not terminal roles. Most young people who join the Peace Corps are not planning a career in “social and health issues in developing economies” although some do. And these students will show up as the lowest of the low on the “how much money do our graduates make when they graduate”. But these are often very high powered on-ramps to other, better paid/interesting careers once the mandatory service period ends. In a bad economy, a student can be very well served by one of these public service roles. Certainly builds skills– highly credible both for professional/grad school and corporate employment. So if it’s a choice between a “survival type job” or snagging one of these competitive public service roles- I’d vote for the latter. And some colleges do an exceptional job here and others do not.
Does the Fulbright/Marshall advisor moonlight as the “here’s how to get a job in media” person? Bad sign. You want specialization. Getting past the first hurdle requires some degree of knowledge about how to phrase, put into context, etc. and the more competitive the program the more important it is to have someone who knows what they are doing.
I don’t know that any of us can predict what the hiring picture will be in four or five years. But betting on “look, 92% of their seniors got jobs in hedge funds and private wealth management and the average salary was $95K” seems like a very poor bet based on what we know right now. One stroke of a pen on the tax status of hedge fund capital gains or private equity carried interest will blow that sector up in a nano-second. And AI is already working its way through private wealth management. The middle market is already fully saturated with packaged software to do what a human being used to do (demographic based asset allocation, risk management, cash flow, estate planning). It’s only a matter of time until customers can basically do it all themselves for a half a percentage point annual fee to access a customer service rep when the software gets wonky. Those nice “I play golf with prospective clients” jobs will be reserved for the truly high net worth individuals and family offices, and the folks who have a $10 million dollar portfolio to manage won’t need Jimmy or Susie to remind them when their RMD is due.
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@blossom, I agree with you that schools whose Career Services folks that help with inflection points (whether temporary or permanent) would be a big asset at this moment. The Peace Corps/Fulbright/Teaching English Abroad path has been a good temporary landing space for people figuring out what to do.
The fellowship person at my son’s LAC proactively contacted him during his junior year, I believe, to set up a meeting to discuss fellowships that they thought he might consider. I was impressed.
Private wealth management should get decimated. Most FAs provide basically standard advice and their fee levels seem very high for what they do. There are some very unusual folks that would seem to merit that fee level, but most seem to me to be replaceable by AI.
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The same could be said for hedge fund managers and other investment “gurus” - the vast majority of them fail to beat their market indices which begs the question of why they make so much money. To me this is one area that is ripe for AI - why does Goldman need to pay junior analysts for work that AI can do in a fraction of the time.
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Yep- that was the point of my very OP 
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@momofboiler1 it accidentally sent before I finish typing what I was going to say. Your point about the strength of the alum networks is very important. So many students change their majors, change their direction, change their careers early, mid and even late in their careers that having those connections is extremely important.
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In the 90s, I had an investment idea – a short-term trading idea that had very good statistical properties. As I and a partner looked at it, we could become registered investment advisors, fund managers or create a hedge fund. The RIAs and fund managers typically got 1% point or less. Whereas the hedge funds were charging between 1% and 2% of assets plus 20% of profits (and was unregulated). A complete no-brainer. We did beat market indices by a lot for a few years and then the inefficiencies we were targeting basically went away so we shut down. No obvious reason for the big difference in fee structures but as a manager, we definitely preferred the higher fee, relatively unregulated path.
There may be a role for hedge funds that do not outperform market indices if they make your portfolio less correlated with the market. But again, there is no obvious reason for the big difference in compensation to managers.
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UW Madison does a similar detailed report. Employers – Engineering Career Services – UW–Madison
But the majority of colleges and universities are not engineering (or other specific professional/pre-professional subset) programs/schools. So for instance, my undergrad for a 5 year post grad window shows that a large # were either working, participating in a fellowship/year-of-service (71%) or continuing their education (23%) within the first 6 mos post graduation, and by 15 years out, 70% have advanced degrees, so while some professional/pre-professional programs numbers might be interesting (though IMO one should look at much more than income data) looking just at salaries from non pre-professional schools/programs would be uninformative.
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uninformative AND misleading.
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One data point that I like is basically “Did you get an outcome that you’re satisfied with?” or “Do you think your education helped you get the outcome you wanted?” Swarthmore, for example, captures this datapoint:
Yes, this is still imperfect, but I think the most interesting data to me is whether students were happy when they left.
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This is a great post.
A student who wants to spend two years working as a counselor at a homeless shelter before applying for an MSW is going to show up as “Loser” on a traditional career outcome report. Not in school after graduation; earning a low salary; etc. But if this is what the student wanted to get out of college- discover his/her passion and go pursue that- how fantastic!
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And similarly, most Clinical Psych grad programs now expect/require some years of “clinical” and/ or research experience. That could be in the form of a low paid mental health associate/Behavioral Health technician (often someone who works in an inpatient or residential treatment facility, etc) or working in a faculty member’s lab after graduation, etc. (or both). These students will have low pay for a few years, and then low/no pay when they are in grad school.
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My family member with a PhD in Clinical Psych spent two years working in a prison infirmary before applying. Not for the faint of heart, but excellent exposure to addiction, a wide range of pathologies, etc. The pay was terrible but it really jumpstarted the process of finding a research mentor. Professors either said “You must be crazy” (not a clinical diagnosis, just a reaction in lay person’s terms) or said “That’s so cool, I just got a grant to study the genetic component of violence– will you join my team?”
But low paying, and likely NOT giving the undergraduate school bragging rights about successful their grads are!
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I didn’t mention the prison system jobs because it is a select few that take those!!!
Others include drug and alcohol rehab facilities, half way houses, etc.
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With over half of college grads majoring in career oriented areas including business, engineering, healthcare, data sciences and education placement data is informative for that very large subset. You are free to ignore it.
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Per NCES, the most popular college majors are in business, healthcare and social sciences. Per coursera, these categories make up about 40% of all majors. Social sciences may include majors such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, history, etc. Healthcare majors may include health education, healthcare administration, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, nursing, public health, etc. Business majors may pursue accountancy type jobs but also could be in marketing, general management, etc. Let’s not forget english majors, theater/music/performing arts, media relations, elementary education, etc. Engineering (for those colleges that offer it) and Computer science related majors are certainly increasing in popularity, but as many here have already said, future predictions for opportunities in the computer sciences may be uncertain. Per the recent coursera article, engineering and computer sciences majors make up about 11.5% of majors. And while some may disagree, there is far more to a college education than how much money they will make right out of college. And for those pursuing medical careers (especially MD/DO degrees), those income numbers may not be reflected in the career outcome lists a few years out of college, as many of them are still in school.
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