Seems like the same arguments can be made against having colleges post net price calculators. Given the posts around these forums, all of the above seem to be common occurrances, but that does not mean that the net price calculators are not useful for many others to estimate financial aid before applying.
^^ Of course, there are parents and students who are fine with those careers (that’s not the point). The point is they all knew the situation and decided to go for it. So how did they know if there’s no “Data” released by the college in a transparent, easy-to-understand format? They knew because the information is there. The information is there with the professors/instructors. University career centers have numbers on number of interviews and number of job offers. Older students and alum can and do talk to current students about their experiences. My point is you don’t necessarily need tables, charts and graphs to know that jobs hard to come by and may be low-paying in certain career paths.
Collecting data costs money.
Tabulating the data into a meaningful format costs money.
Create a federal mandate that colleges need to report salary information broken down by academic department, and even a small college needs to hire people to audit and comply with a federal mandate.
How many people do you know who smoke who can quote you chapter and verse the lung cancer and emphysema statistics? The CDC could not be more transparent on the dangers of smoking.
I don’t have the faith that the rest of you do that merely collecting, analyzing and presenting MORE data leads to better decision making. But carry on.
My company uses several consulting firms to help us understand compensation in different parts of the world, helps us normalize survey data so you can make useful (and statistically accurate) comparisons, etc. It’s not as easy as looking at the chart they give you in Weight Watchers and seeing that an apple has fewer calories than a Snickers Bar. (would that it would be that easy). A salaried professional in the UK will be getting much more lucrative benefits than his or her counterpart in the US (all things being equal) because of the way the tax code operates but their base salary is usually lower. A person working at a tech start up will often have a significantly lower base pay because the stock options (if the company goes public) are so generous. A person working for the UN in the US gets triple tax exemption which is worth a LOT of money- much more than the salary survey will indicate. A teacher in a district whose union has successfully maintained their defined pension benefit is going to show a lower salary than someone in another district- although the teacher in that district will out-earn the higher paid teacher by a meaningful multiple post-retirement. A public servant who is allowed to log overtime (i.e. police) can out-earn the superintendent of schools- although police have very high rates of disability and early retirement (which superintendents do not) and therefore the correct metric on police salaries is lifetime earnings, not necessarily a single year (which year will you pick for the college’s data collection- a highwater year or a low earnings year?).
Etc.
The data is messy. There are people who make a living helping organizations understand how to use salary data for benchmarking. Will every Jane and Joe Q. Public understand that sometimes the INFORMATION is the exact opposite of what the DATA seems to show?
In the particular case for art, popular perception of art earnings is not too far off from reality.
But it appears that popular perception of earnings related to subjects like biology, computer game design, etc. do not match reality. Also, people often fail to consider the economic and industry cycles affecting prospects for engineering and CS graduates.
I don’t think I am arguing against providing transparent, easy to understand information. I think I am arguing against requiring colleges to provide information that is (a) not transparent at all, (b) not easy to understand, © likely to be misinterpreted no matter how much care is taken in presenting it (and care in presentation will tend to make it less understandable), (d) subject to a number of arbitrary simplifications that essentially undermine its usefulness, and (e) quite difficult to collect, and impossible to collect with full accuracy. Apart from that, it’s a great idea.
In a sense, this is a little like Naviance – which, by the way, I think is often quite useful. If you are lucky enough to go to a school that has it, you get a lovely graph of admissions results for your school at specific colleges relative to GPA and SAT (or ACT). Which is very, very useful, if it happens to be a college that admits primarily based on GPA and test scores, and to which lots of kids from your school apply. And which is only a little useful if GPA and test scores are not the main determinants of admission, and/or if there are not lots of applicants from your school (but even then, it’s maybe a little useful in warning you that GPA and test scores aren’t enough).
What would make Naviance a lot less useful would be if you couldn’t get results that were specific to your school, you had to look at results that combined a number of schools that maybe weren’t that similar. And if instead of showing all of the data points, it only showed you medians, or ranges, without a sense of the sample size that produced them, and without the ability to understand that either end of the range might be based on factors completely external to the analysis. (With Naviance, at least you can appreciate visually that an outlier is an outlier.) And if every college were using holistic admissions almost to the exclusion of stats-based admissions, with a zillion preferences for alumni, athletes, mathletes, development cases, certain races, and general friends and family. Which, of course, is exactly what the job market is like.
And now, let’s make it even less useful. Because colleges, different as they may be, are far more standardized than careers, or even individual jobs. People zig-zag into careers, they don’t mainly all enter in the same three-month period. And their initial jobs are often not their careers at all. In most cases – maybe even all cases – a first job is in part a continuation of education, and in part an investment in establishing credentials for better jobs down the road.
For the vast majority of kids I know in my kids’ and nieces’ and nephews’ cohorts, not to mention my own cohort, knowing what they made in their first post-college job would tell you next to nothing about their career paths or expected career earnings, except that things were not so linear.
So, more power to you if you think that this information would be easy to understand. I don’t think you understand it at all. I know I don’t understand it.
Naviance is an example of how something (a data set or a ranking system) that seemingly adds information can derail someone if they don’t understand things like stats and systematic error. Please don’t take this as a criticism of Naviance. But, if you don’t understand some basic facts about judgements, you can be lead astray by it. Here is how:
A student attends a typical suburban high school that is well rated. Like most similar schools, they have college reps come to showcase various schools and each year a few students are accepted to the most competitive schools, while most go to good schools, public schools, and large and small schools. In other words, there is nothing distinguishing this public school from hundreds of others. Suzie Q is interested in attending School X. She goes on Naviance and finds that there were 12 students who applied last year and 4 were accepted. All 4 had higher scores than she does. She looks at the school’s CDS and finds that her scores place her at the 75th percentile compared to the 10,000 students who are attending as freshman this year. IN fact, 5 years of the university data show that her quantifiable stats place her in a good position. Yet, for a few years, the students accepted from her school had higher stats. Should she pay attention to the high school’s limited data set or should she pay attention to the tens of thousands of data points shown in published material by the college?
Based on discussion I have had with students and guidance counselors, my impression is that there is a tendency to value the Naviance high school specific data over the college’s DCS data. Yet, why would you put more credence in a tiny little data pool compared to data from tens of thousands of applicants? The only possible way that high school data could be more informative is if you thought that there are characteristics of your high school that render the larger data pool irrelevant. That might be true if your high school was very specialized or if it had special relationships with a few very competitive schools. But if your high school is similar to high schools in suburbs across the country, it makes no sense to value a tiny data set over a huge one. Since people don’t understand this, they risk making errors if they base decisions on the tiny data set provided about their school.
Not sure how a college can compel its graduates to report their earnings.
A college can’t “compel” its’ graduates to report their earnings but many will willingly do so. In my son’s class, 65 percent of engineering graduates did complete the post grad survey. http://www.career.vt.edu/PostGraduationSurveyReport/PostGrad.html This link gives some background as to why the data is collected, how it is used, and some of the factors that effect the results. Obviously, there is not full participation in the survey and some factors effect employability at any given time, such as the state of the economy .
Biology is such a broad discipline with a broad range of earnings - a table of recent graduate earnings may not be very helpful. People who major in such a narrow field as computer game design are much like actors or artists - it’s something they want to do regardless of the salary.
Can’t see how tables, charts and graphs will help with this. Especially when they are likely to be outdated tables, charts and graphs.
Like GMTplus7, I’m also puzzled by how colleges are to obtain reliable earnings data from graduates.
The only parties that know my salary are my employer, myself, my spouse, my tax accountant, and the gov’t Revenue Service.
I don’t even tell my kids how much I make, so why would I share that info with my college?
“why would I share that info with my college?” You don’t have to. A college can’t “compel” you to do so. I actually encouraged my kids to complete the surveys for both their colleges. I figured it could be potentially helpful to students coming after them , to get some idea of salary and who potential employers might be. It helps the colleges see where their kids are going, what employers are hiring their students, what grad and professional schools their students are going to. Even if the data is “messy”, it can still be useful in general . It can be helpful to look at Career Fair info as well to see what employers are visiting campus.
I was curious about my other kid’s current school info so looked it up. 67 percent of the engineering grads from 2014 completed the post grad survey so clearly lots of people are willing to provide the requested info. http://www.seas.virginia.edu/admin/careerdev/files/seasannualreport.pdf Of private schools, I have seen pretty detailed info available from CMU and Penn.
The Economist magazine recently ran an analysis in March 2015 and came to the conclusion:
“It depends what you study, not where”
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-depends-what-you-study-not-where
“Engineering graduates from run-of-the-mill colleges do only slightly worse than those from highly
selective ones. Business and economics degrees also pay well, delivering a solid 8.7% average return.
Courses in the arts or the humanities offer vast spiritual rewards, of course, but less impressive material ones.”
This analysis uses the PayScale earnings data but could be updated to use the recently released College Scorecard earnings data from the Department of Education.
No force necessary as the information is already out there, the Lumina Foundation has made it work.
From the site I linked to in post #43
Economic Success Metrics (ESM) report the extent to which graduates from colleges and universities are “economically successful.” These metrics on this website build on data from two state-level systems – one that holds higher education student unit record (SUR) data and another that holds unemployment insurance (UI) data. Together, these two datasets allow us to measure how well graduates from the same degree program at different colleges or universities within the state – or in different programs at the same institution - are doing in the state’s job market.
Albion Girl- I checked computer science degrees for a couple of the large public institutions (since it’s a pretty easy major to compare across institutions) and found that in some cases, the entire cohort comprises 15 respondents. 15.
I would not be making academic decisions using a website with such a small number of responses. You are better off with a dart board.
And using unemployment records opens up an entirely different (and statistically complex) set of issues.
Take a basic statistics course before you laud the Lumina Foundation’s database. And yes- the system falls apart unless you get robust responses from college’s grads including the high-earners, the low-earners; the ones with primarily cash (i.e. base salary) comp as well as those with non-cash comp (stock grants and options, other forms of deferred comp) and hundreds of asterisks to explain the variance.
LinkedIn is useful for observing what graduates do. I used this to eliminate a trip to an LAC in Colorado.
You looked at one subject and extrapolated to the whole site which includes colleges and majors from six states.
The Lumina Foundation data are a work in progress but are better than PayScale, College Scorecard, or anything else I have yet seen. I think it’s rather patronizing to suggest that people should not have access to the data that are available because “higher minds” have decided that they aren’t competent to analyze it.
You mean the way elite schools being sued for discrimination refuse to allow people to access their admissions data, because the unwashed masses are too dumb to analyze it?
Higher minds" or just folks who know there are many ways to find the info one wants? You don’t always “need” to rely on someone else packaging the info for you. In fact, the go-getters aren’t dependent on that. Nor do they assume that post-grad dollars measure success. Or that their kid is somehow now destined for post-grad wealth if he just goes to that college, majors in that subject, and catches the fairy dust.
Judging by CC, many can’t analyze what does lie in front of them. Sorry, that’s snarky, but too many people are not digging, they rest on what they heard or think. And, continue to repeat misinfo.
Of course, it would be nice to know that, if your kid majors in X at College A, the outcome might be better than at College Z. But it’s not so superficial, no guarantees if your kid doesn’t get in gear. No fairy dust.
“A” might have rigorous programs across the board, engaged professors, promote internships, have a good career office, etc. All of your courses at “A” might demand a high level of critical thinking, your peers may be highly self-directed influencers, not dawdlers. Your kid may then find his/her own acceleration. Or not.
But the real source of that isn’t who’s making what dollars. Those influencers may go off to run community programs or start a small business, etc. Some may slink over to a job in a family venture, some may go off to law careers, etc. It’s not major equals job.
To get an idea, you don’t look at rankings. You vet the dept, the courses, the profs, the standards and expectations at “A” vs “Z,” what sorts of kids they tend to admit, in the first place. Everyone with a B (or C) average is an auto-admit? That can be an Oops. Or it can be an opportunity for your kid to shine, if he does have the right stuff.
Who really thinks salary info will predict their kid’s trajectory?