<p>I get your point Blossom. Indeed, life is complex and the data could certainly be quite misleading or simply impossible to parse. That said, I have a dear friend with a dear daughter who did marine biology at a little known private college to the tune of about 150k. She has not been able to land any job whatsoever beyond waitressing and working in shops at the local mall. She has also not been able to get into any graduate program (I have no idea how her grades and GRE are). Her family is sending her on diving trips, hoping she will land some sort of Jacques Cousteau job. They are completely flabbergasted that she didn’t go right to work in marine biology!</p>
<p>Do you not think this family could have benefited by looking at some of the data for kids at this college doing this major? The daughter is seriously unhappy, and I suspect actually in a depression over all of this.</p>
<p>Level of happiness is often due to how the results compare to the expectations. Making it easier for students to set realistic expectations going in makes it less likely for them to suffer let-down at the end. In this case, “expectations” can include all of the following: likelihood of employment or graduate/professional school at graduation, likelihood of employment relating to the major, and probable pay levels for those who are employed.</p>
<p>Many parents and students seem to have unrealistically high expectations in one or more of these areas, which may lead them to make poor college decisions (e.g. too much student loan debt). A student who realizes going in that the chance of employment being related to his/her major is low, and what typical employment/unemployment rates and pay levels are, may be able to make a better informed decision going in, and be happier at the end, rather than feeling let down. (looks like post #201 is an example)</p>
<p>Also, the unemployment line is unlikely to be a happy place to be.</p>
<p>blossom – The compensation numbers in the Penn survey are problematic. They don’t match compensation with major, just with “job type” and employer type. But also, only about 75% of the people with jobs reported their compensation.</p>
<p>In any event, people working for labs made about $29,000 on average, which is pretty much what I would expect for a holding-place, non-career job. The point I take from this is that this is a tremendous amount of information and I know practically nothing about the real job prospects for Penn biology majors from studying it. Although it does give me a sense that there are lots of jobs they get hired for, and that most of them are going to graduate school eventually.</p>
<p>sewhappy – Of course, it would help people whose kid wanted to do marine biology to know things like (a) whether there are any career-track jobs in marine biology, (b) what kinds of graduate degrees people get, (c) how many people from her college get those graduate degrees, (d) how the graduate degrees are funded, (e) what people do to get themselves into graduate school, and (f) what do they do if they don’t get into graduate school. That’s all super-relevant information. The problem is, without having all or most of that information, you have no clue how to interpret statistics about the jobs and pay of marine biology BAs or BSs from a particular college.</p>
<p>It seems unlikely that the outlook for biology majors overall is as optimistic as what you see from Penn’s career survey.</p>
<p>At Berkeley, molecular and cell biology was the largest undergraduate major for the graduating class of 2011. (And it is not the only biology major on campus.)</p>
<p>The comparison of numbers to the numbers who even applied to medical school (much less got admitted) indicates that most are not going that direction. (And not all of the medical school applicants are molecular and cell biology majors.)</p>
<p>I just looked at the Penn report on the College (i.e., not Wharton, not Nursing) class of 2004, five years out. The response rate was only 34%. But of the former biology majors who responded, and who had full-time jobs, two-thirds were MDs and DOs. Plus a scattering of dentists and veterinarians, and two nurses. Fully 14% of the people who responded (i.e., not just people with a biology-related major) had as their terminal degree an MD, DO, DMD, DVM, or PhD in a biology-related field.</p>
<p>ucb – what you say is true about the Berkeley numbers, but I still note that, at least among the people who responded to the survey, there were as many ex-biology majors in medical school or PhD programs immediately after graduation as there were working, and, furthermore, that they cut off the medical school application numbers one year after graduation, which probably represents a good majority of people going to medical school, but hardly all of them.</p>
<p>And of course “the outlook for biology majors overall is [not] as optimistic as what you see from Penn’s career survey.” Duh. That’s why data by major across institutions is practically useless – probably less useful than data for a single institution but not broken down by major. But even if you have one institution, and you break things down by major, you still don’t have the tools to draw real conclusions.</p>
<p>“Far exceeds the demand” means there are lots more marine biology majors than marine biologist jobs. I want colleges to collect and disseminate employment data, but as has been noted, lots of people do not properly inform themselves until it is too late.</p>
<p>My grad school rommate was a marine bio gal- and she hasn’t had a job gap yet, over decades. a) she got the grad degree and b) she was already doing vol work, internships and summer clerical for an enviro group, while in college. </p>
<p>It really is the motion that defines the opps- not what motion other kids in that program had or didn’t.</p>
<p>“Employers for marine biologists can include zoological parks, aquariums, governmental agencies, laboratories, educational institutions, museums, publications, environmental advocacy or conservation groups, consulting companies, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard.”</p>
<p>sewhappy, how have other kids who graduated in marine biology in her program done? As others have pointed out it’s an oversubscribed field, but is she an outlier at her school or is everyone having the same problem? </p>
<p>I found with my older son’s friends, many (various majors) seem to be drifting along. Partly because they never did much productive over the summers either. Without employment history or obvious skills they are finding it hard to get a first job. My son worked every summer he was in college. Obviously he was lucky to be in demand, but still! Younger son worked last summer and studied Arabic the summer before. After another semester abroad he now speaks comfortably. As he says, while he doesn’t have the vocabulary for everything he does have enough to say what he wants. (Gave as an example only knowing the word for bomb, not nuclear bomb - so having to talk about the big special bomb that we used in Japan.)</p>
<p>I think you’re getting at an excellent point. The kids who understand that it is not just the degree itself but also the internships and extras (like learning Arabic!) that tip you into a first good job. But then I think we need to look at the schools at how their career services and internship assistance resources are doing, don’t you? Many kids go off to college without the family understanding of what it takes. This particular girl’s dad owns and operates a garage, mom runs an home daycare. Bright people but not terribly savvy about higher ed and professional fields. So when they make such a big investment for their kid, I think it would help if the information was laid out AND the schools helped more with preparing meaningful resumes.</p>
<p>Median salary for WHERE though? If the median salary is $40,000 and you are earning that in small town, Midwest USA you are doing pretty good. If you are earning that in NYC or San Francisco, you are qualifying for food stamps. There are just too many factors involved to think that number is of any use to anyone.</p>
<p>^I think only a family of four is qualifying for food stamps. A single person can live in the NYC area on that salary easily.</p>
<p>I do think the career service offices of most colleges could be doing a much better job, both at helping kids get prepared and at giving them realistic views of various job prospects. Career surveys is a piece of it, but they really need to include all the asterisks and five and ten year outcomes as well to have any real use. Even at Carnegie Mellon, I got the impression that the informal network was more effective than anyone official.</p>
<p>Great- its more important to <em>you</em>. That doesnt mean that the data should be withheld from people who dont share your viewpoint. Especially since they are the ones who have to find a way to pay their loans. </p>
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<p>I continue to be bemused by people who prejudge this project. </p>
<p>“It too expensive”- except we dont know the cost since the bill hasnt been scored yet</p>
<p>“It requires colleges hiring an army of administrators and that drives up tuition!” - this project is described as dis-aggregating IPEDs cdata that is already being collected by the government. There isnt a reason at this point to think its an excessive burden on the colleges. </p>
<p>Likewise, you have even seen that data yet- I dont know how anyone can confidentially conclude there is too much noise in data that they havent even seen.</p>
<p>The basic problem is that “buying” a college degree is not the same thing as buying a car. Cars are pretty complex products, but nowhere near as complex as degrees. You can read a bunch of specs and some Consumer Reports articles, and have a pretty good idea how one car compares to another, its strong points and weak points, and what you are paying for when you buy that car with that package. It would be great if there were similar information about colleges you could access, but there really isn’t, and it isn’t just a question of making some hidden data public. Even super-simplistic data isn’t actually being collected, and would be hard to collect. The IPEDs data doesn’t even scratch the surface. The data you would need to actually do an evaluation – I have no idea how that could be dealt with. And, even then, you would face data with a lot of variation, big standard deviations in most fields, and people would have to understand what other factors were affecting outcomes.</p>
<p>I’m not arguing against more transparency. More transparency would be fine, But I don’t think it would get people very far towards understanding what they were buying a lot better.</p>
<p>And argy – I can conclude that there’s too much noise in the data, because I have seen data that people have collected trying to answer these questions, and there’s a lot of noise in them. And when I think about the lives and careers of the people I know, I can see how many factors are affecting their employment in the few years after college, and how little the data is dealing with that. So I don’t know how you get rid of the noise when you make rougher cuts.</p>
<p>If all data on colleges is too noisy, then how should students and parents choose colleges? If two colleges meet the baseline criteria of being affordable and having the intended major(s), but one costs more than the other, should they choose just based on intuitive feelings about whether the more expensive one is worth the extra cost? If the student is undecided between two majors, should the student ignore the possibility of checking potential major-specific job prospects as a tie breaker?</p>
<p>Not a terribly wise idea to choose a college for a major when 80% of students change their majors at least once. Many schools don’t even allow kids to declare until the end of sophomore year.</p>
<p>If the student is undecided or otherwise likely to change majors, then that adds more constraints on the college selection, in that suitable fit colleges need to have decent degree programs in all of the possible majors that the student may choose. Otherwise, a student who wants to change majors to something not available at the college may have to transfer.</p>
Assume the available information was comparable, and the “sales” were similar.</p>
<p>I also don’t think we need laws requiring used car sellers to offer test drives, or requiring a Carfax report or complete service records or a mechanic’s certification for every sale. If I’m looking for a car I’m going to require some or all of those things or I walk away. </p>
<p>If the schools already have all this data as some contend, and it is important to me, I’ll demand it. If they don’t supply it I’ll be suspicious, and I may just walk away.</p>
<p>Many people, in all kind of areas, prefer not to have solid, verifiable data. Good data often lead to uncomfortable questions, and maybe some accountability. It’s much easier to engage in creative discourse of hypothetical situations and debate anecdotes, in the absence of verifiable data.</p>