Transparency to college graduate employment data for prospective students

Parents Forum
1

It continues to be difficult for parents and students to make informed choices about colleges and majors. Currently, underemployment and unemployment are high for new college grads, and many students have no idea about typical outcomes for the colleges and majors that they are considering. This information is particularly important to lower income, and less educated families. These families are less likely to understand the importance of choice of major or choice of school on their financial prospects.

What is needed is a standard and comparable Monroney sticker of information that all schools are required to disclose to all prospective students for each major. Colleges should be required to track, and provide transparency to, placement and salary information for the school, and by major. The current opacity / misleading data leads to a significant disconnect between what many students imagine they will do when they graduate, and what they will actually do. That disconnect prevents informed decision making.

There is no good reason that colleges should not be required to collect employment data, and provide potential students with clear, standardized, and comparable information, so students can make informed decisions.

2

This might be useful in a meritocratic system… but we don’t have that.

I truly think these types of things will do more harm than good. MOST people do not get a job (or not get one) based on their major. It comes from so many other factors- yes, major and school maybe being one- that this information is really useless.

Besides, averages mean nothing to an individual.

3

You perseverate on this idea. In a blunt, linear world people get jobs according to their major and school. In the real world it doesn’t work like that.

4

@romanigypsyeyes “these types of things will do more harm than good.”

It is rarely the case that providing customers additional transparency to information does more harm than good. I can’t imagine what the rationale could be for the idea that not providing this information, benefits students and parents.

@romanigypsyeyes “MOST people do not get a job (or not get one) based on their major.”

Choice of major often has a significant impact on outcomes. However, if choice of major does not matter in some cases, the data will show that.

@romanigypsyeyes “averages mean nothing to an individual.”

It is certainly true that when the standard deviation is large, averages do mean less. However, they still provide information. Standard deviations, and ranges would be helpful too.

5

I like this idea. There are schools and majors where a LOT of the students don’t end up working in their majors, or getting into grad programs that are reputable, or just have long stretches of unemployment after college.

Let consumers decide if the data is relevant – say a lot of math majors end up in consulting from a given school. Or the bio majors are unemployed or underemployed (I would be shocked, SHOCKED!). That is fine – I’d still like to see it. We get lots of data on students coming in (test scores, GPAs, etc), but almost zero on outcomes. Given the cost of college, it is actually pretty crazy. Choosing a college now is a leap of faith, based in word of mouth, marketing materials, and anectodal evidence of outcomes.

The hard part, of course, is data collection. Students have no incentive to cooperate. Lots of students don’t stay in touch with their colleges. Could they be incented to provide this info? Not sure… But right now it is amazing that colleges get away with charging a quarter of a million dollars in some case with no metrics on outcomes except the graduation rate.

6

There are many unemployed and underemployed people with college educations, lots of whom are recent college graduates. In this forum, there are recent discussions about merits of liberal arts degrees, the very high cost of a college education, and identification of those majors that result in the highest income after graduation. Trying to make sense of all this conflicting information is like herding cats; there is more scatter than coherence. When it comes to the cost of higher education, there are simply too many factors that we can’t control as individuals. Indeed, the value of college is less what I earn, but what I think about, evaluate, appreciate, enjoy, and learn everyday.

Some things seem true to me. The goal of higher education is learning now and developing interests and skills to learn and move forward personally and professionally in the future. Life shouldn’t be intellectually barren or boring. Hence the term commencement.

The goal of higher education isn’t a specific job such as teaching in the elementary school that I attended. That’s so unlikely to happen! Rather set of a goal of becoming an inspirational teacher. Now, it seems fewer people plan on taking one career path and stick on its until retirement like our parents and grandparents did or earn an mrs. For many a degree or professional goal, changes over time as new opportunities and interests lead to different types of job categories/descriptions and/or professional interests/directions. Lots of students graduate with a major is something different from what they planned to study when they matriculated. Worrying about the best major for my son, daughter, or…wastes time and emotional energy. Major in what is personally satisfying and do well academically in that area.

I understand the critical importance of a salary, but chose a profession that has morphed in many fascinating and rewarding directions; but financially, not so much. Yet, I would rather have less money than be an/in…for example, after seeing what business majors read and study, that would have never happen. Today’s hot major may be quite cold by the time someone graduates. Moreover, economy, technology and society change constantly. Basically, we all make personal choices about the direction of our lives and it would be sad if we squandered the only life we know we’ll have by majoring in what our parents demanded or the most lucrative or the most boring. etc. when they don’t match our personal goals and interests or we expected that the world would wait for us while we were in college. By the way as an observation, we all start at the bottom professionally. For example, if you are a communications major, you will start out as a reporter in a small market, rather than at a major network in NYC regardless of where you went to school. Being realistic helps irrespective of where we went to school.

So, there are any number of problems earning a degree today–or yesterday or tomorrow. Rather than setting our eyes on what is the right major or the best fit or the most financially rewarding or what are parents or grandparents insist upon even when they contribute financially, I think we do best to know ourselves, our goals and interests for now and the future, remain open to new opportunities and possibilities and seek learning–what did you learn today! In my case, I attended a small, liberal arts college and matriculated immediately after gradation into the number 1 graduate program in my professional area. My family went from very annoyed to wanting siblings to go to a college they had initially thought was worthless. We went in different directions as our heads and hearts led us and graduated happy with out choices. If instead, I had tried to adhere to a rigid score card about things that I should do because…, I think life, at least mine, would be less satisfying. Ultimately, I like working in my expanded field except for some days and avidly learn history and geology by reading rather than by dirt, and follow books by characters or authors. Final thought, don’t go anywhere without a book.

7

Not only do most people not necessarily get a job based on their major, people within the same major often end up in wildly different career paths with different salary levels. They choose to do different things with their major. My siblings and I all majored in math as undergrads. We followed very different career paths that do not overlap or intersect and I would say there are even more paths out there for just this one major. I would hate to limit a young person’s view on their future by saying - “if you major in X, then you will have Y career and earn N dollars” - that’s just not how the world works.

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@pizzagirl In a blunt, linear world people get jobs according to their major and school. In the real world it doesn’t work like that.

A college education is a product that people buy. In fact, it is one of the largest purchases of a person’s life.

I am not suggesting that college and major are the only determinants of who gets a job or is admitted to a graduate school, but they are significantly impactful. If college and major do not matter, the data would show that. People who believe they do not matter should be happy to have this information disclosed, so they can finally put an end to the discussion. In reality, they don’t want it disclosed, because they will have to face reality. Who wants to do that?

@zannah “Worrying about the best major for my son, daughter, or…wastes time and emotional energy.”…“had tried to adhere to a rigid score card about things that I should do because…, I think life, at least mine, would be less satisfying.”

That is fine, it is just information. Each person can decide whether they wish to consider that information or ignore it. In no way am I suggesting that anyone is required to do anything with the information unless they want to.

9

I think colleges have a pretty vested interest in not doing this. They really don’t want to try to quantify what the outcomes are.

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@intparent “it is amazing that colleges get away with charging a quarter of a million dollars in some case with no metrics on outcomes except the graduation rate.”

Exactly.

It is true that helping a student choose the best major for them is complicated, and there are many factors to consider. However, employment rates and salaries are factors that people may wish to consider.

To me the arguments against making this information transparent to consumers is like the argument against warning labels for cigarettes. Someone might say, “Why tell customers that the average person is much more likely to get cancer if they smoke? The purchaser is not an average person, and may not get cancer. Plus there are many other factors besides smoking that impact cancer risk.” That is true, but providing that information to customers still allows them to make a more informed decision.

@intparent “I think colleges have a pretty vested interest in not doing this”

Right. Colleges do not want to do this. They do not want consumers to be informed. They want you to trust them. Just like purveyors of any large purchase item. However, for homes, cars, and mortgages, the seller is required to make certain disclosures. That should be true for colleges too. Buyers can ignore it if they want to.

The wealthy and highly educated benefit from the lack of disclosure too, because they have much better guesses at what the answers really are than poor, uneducated parents do. That allows them to make more informed decisions.

11

I don’t know… I am pretty highly educated, and reasonably well off (5%er, I think), and I don’t feel like this answer is any more available to me than anyone else.

12

Some schools actually do have post-graduation surveys by major. However, use caution when comparing across schools, due to differences in survey and reporting methodology.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/16559971/#Comment_16559971

13

I want to know what company people work for, job title, and grad schools enrolled in or degrees from at 5 years after graduation. I actually don’t care for salary data as much.

14

^^^I think you can do a search on Linkedin if you join.

15

I doubt this would work. I din’t know if you can search that way (Cornell class of 2013?) Then you would have to click into everyone, but not sure if you can see detail in everyone depending on how they have set up their account. And some people would not be on LinkedIn. I want the colleges to collect it and presents in a standardized way.

16

VA Tech puts out a list broken down by majors. I wish other schools published similar lists. I’ve not been able to find this for other schools:

http://www.career.vt.edu/scripts/PostGrad2006/Report/DetailReportSalaries.asp?College=00&Majors=Y&Cohort=2013-2014

17

Penn has the most detailed information I have seen on immediate post-graduation employment, and they are trying to figure out how to expand it to 5 years after graduation. But its value is in the granular data, because the medians are really misleading (as are the top and bottom of the range). Here’s a link to the index page: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/reports.php What they do is to report in which industries students with a particular major got jobs, and within an industry what the range of compensation is, not tied to major.

The fact of the matter is that there may be a handful of majors that may be a significant, independent factor in short-term financial success post graduation. They don’t vary much from one college to the next, so college-specific data isn’t going to help much. And – apart from “business,” a major that in all likelihood is no more than a marker for students who are willing to prioritize employment and income – they are mainly comparatively difficult majors that most students would have trouble completing. So it’s a more than a little misleading to tell everyone to pursue an engineering or computer science degree. Moreover, if vastly more students entered those fields, and were successful in completing the majors, fundamental economics suggests that the salary advantage would vanish PDQ, so the advice would be self-defeating.

According to the recent Economist study, the best predictor of short term income is SAT score, not major. The apparently advantageous majors may really just represent high concentrations of high intelligence students. Family wealth is also a great predictor of short-term income (as well as of SAT scores). So if you really want to help consumers, colleges should publish jobs and earnings data broken down by SAT score and family wealth. Then you could see which college is likely to maximize your earnings.

18

You may also want to look at the career survey reports from MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Cal Poly, and Virginia Tech.

Yes, it may be that these career paths, where specific college majors are more necessary or desired as preparation, separate the good from the bad at the college level (those bad at the subject do not stay in the major). In contrast, some other career paths, which are more major-agnostic, separate the good and the bad at a later stage. The good practitioners in any area tend to do well; the bad ones not so well. But some career paths screen out the bad ones before they even enter the job market (e.g. when students still in school find out from the introductory engineering courses that engineering is really not something they like or are good at, so they switch to some other major), so the pay levels reflect only the decent to good ones, not the full range of bad to good (plus the effect of the restriction on the supply of entry level employees in the job market).

19

IMHO the colleges could publish the data six ways to Sunday and (most) people would still ignore the findings, or it wouldn’t be relevant to them.

Does it help to know that dermatology and orthopedic surgery are high paying specialties when your kid is struggling through organic chemistry and is likely not to make it into med school? Does it help to know that developing trading algorithms at DE Shaw (and that this company pays huge bucks for talented math and physics majors-- not finance majors) is more lucrative than becoming a banker at Wells Fargo focused on small business lending? And that you’re not getting a high paying job at Bridgewater majoring in “business” from directional state U, even if the “data” suggests otherwise…

I don’t get the confusion. There are a number of “sorting sticks” in our economy which- by the time someone is 40 or so- tend to lump the nursery school teachers and the dental hygienists and social workers and music therapists into one pile, vs. the neurosurgeons and the derivatives traders and the CEO’s of successful tech start ups into another pile.

But you guys are implying that the choice of a college- at age 17- when most kids just are clueless about life and their goals and their interests- is more determinative than it actually is. Choice of major is a sorting stick. Choice of college is a sorting stick. BUT talent, interest, aptitude, skill, distinctive abilities, physical stamina, drive- that’s the real sorting stick.

Who works at your local public library? One of the librarians at mine has a PhD in literature- who is not shelving books and helping kids with information look-ups by choice, but because he was diagnosed with a serious mental illness during his doctorate program and he needs quiet and regularity in order to function well with his meds. Is this Princeton’s doing? Who teaches yoga at your local community center- parents who left high priced corporate jobs for better work life balance in my neighborhood- does that mean that Columbia does a bad job churning out history majors who go to law school and end up as M&A advisers to Fortune 50 companies until they burn out?

Exactly what information do you think is going to help your kid make a better decision at age 17???

The kids I know at Hofstra aren’t there because some algorithm told them it would lead to better career outcomes than Swarthmore. They couldn’t get into Swarthmore. Or Middlebury. Or Binghamton. So their parents are delusional if they think that majoring in math at Hofstra is going to put them on equal footing for a job at DE Shaw as the kids (which DE Shaw is recruiting) majoring in math at MIT and Berkeley. Delusional.

If your kid is barely breaking 500 on his math SAT’s, his life isn’t over. But looking at college/career/salary data which shows you- in great granularity- all the lucrative careers for kids who are strong in math is a waste of time. Whether math is the core component of these jobs, or just a “gating” device by the employers, your kid is not going there. Sorry.

My company spends millions of dollars training new college grads to do all sorts of things. But we don’t teach remedial math and we can’t teach core literacy/reading comprehension/verbal skills. Which is why although it’s PC to bash companies which use SAT scores to screen resumes- there’s logic behind it. I can teach the U Chicago Philosophy graduate to do a discounted cash flow analysis- and she’ll probably pick it up faster and be more comprehensive in her analysis than the “international business major” from random directional state U. But I can’t teach a 22 year old kid how to attack the “if Susie is driving to St. Louis at 50 MPH” problem if he or she is 22 years old and lacks the mathematical acuity to approach these types of problems. Or knows what goes on the top and what goes on the bottom when calculating a percentage, or how to read (or construct) a bar chart.

You want to help your kid? Figure out what he or she is really good at. Figure out what gets his or her engine running. And then excel at that. Really excel. Superintendents make more money than first grade teachers. The head of Special Services for a large school district makes more money (much more money) than a speech therapist. The director of marketing and sales for a dental supply company makes more money than a dental hygienist.

Even in relatively low-wage sectors there is a food chain. But to tell the kid who wants to move the needle in K-12 education that he really needs to study petroleum engineering- and that the statistics show that XYZ college graduates better paying engineers than ABC college is ludicrous. And if oil prices plunge by the time your kid squeaks through an engineering program… and your kid eeked out the 2.8 GPA because engineering was not his/her “thing”- hmmm. How helpful were those employment statistics broken out by college and major???

20

There are so many other factors besides college and major. Someone mentioned family wealth which is one of those. I would also add willingness to relocate, and a host of other personal factors that are difficult to quantify such as good interview skills, ambition, willingness to be flexible and open minded in what job you will take,etc.

I’s sure there may be “typical” outcomes but that may not be relevant for any individual student.