<p>Only a few colleges make public their post-graduation surveys by major. Not all of them provide the same information, or report the numbers in the same manner. Of course, not all students respond to post-graduation surveys either.</p>
<p>For most college students, it is, at least partially.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. It appears that a lot of people are under the impression that “all STEM majors have good job prospects” when that is not the case for biology and chemistry majors.</p>
<p>There is quite a bit of data as others have said.The data I prefer is subscription only which is unfortunate. If the information that is gathered from the National Association of Colleges & Employers could be integrated into the existing iPEDS that would be lovely. NACE has 2,000 college members so that is a pretty good representation. And if the feds can find where the states store their data that’s fine.That said, I’m another one who agrees that you don’t go to college to get a job…unless it’s pre-pro program at a university…but it is interesting to see where kids are 5 years out. I always look at the alumni magazines for every college my kids were interested in to see where the early after college alums were reporting.</p>
<p>^^Yes, I always figured the ones that report to the alumni magazine are the “successful” ones, but it is very interesting to note the differences from college to college.</p>
<p>Penn does a superb job of providing this information on a regular basis, and I believe they now have enough data to start to include 5- and 10-year information, too. But it takes an incredible amount of work to produce.</p>
<p>From the article, it looks like they are going to simply (“simply” is a big lol here) match up income/unemployment data with educational records. So a kid going to Harvard Law School is going to show up as not earning very much (at least until she gets that second-year summer job in New York), and then a few years later as earning a ton, and her data will be averaged in with all the other English majors at her school, with no indication that she spent another $200,000 to earn that income. Which is almost as stupid as the systems that systematically ignore the 90% of English majors who get some other degree and wind up telling you what the English major is worth based on 10% of the population, most of who aren’t actually supporting themselves. You can’t tell the difference between a barista, a graduate student, a trustafarian, or the stay-at-home spouse of a millionaire.</p>
<p>Data on earnings should be reported intelligently. For students who majored in X and graduated five years ago, you could report the fraction who were working full time and their average salary and also the fraction that are in graduate and professional school.</p>
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<p>When the government offers Pell grants and subsidized student loans to study something, it is indirectly suggesting that doing so is responsible.</p>
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<p>Providing prospective students with earnings and graduation rate data by major for they are considering would help them make responsible decisions.</p>
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<p>Why don’t colleges do studies and then tell prospective electrical engineering majors that in the past, someone with your high school grades and test scores has had an X% chance of graduating in 6 years?</p>
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<p>This could be made a condition for receiving federally subsidized student loans.</p>
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<p>This conveys some information but suffers from being a biased sample – unemployed students living at home will not be eager to report that.</p>
<p>And what about the ‘successful-major-of-the-day/month/year’ aspect, where we’ve seen that job tracks, demand & popularity are cyclical in nature? Seems to me that it’s like the investment caveat–past performance is no indication of future returns.</p>
<p>What this legislation will do is to reinforce the cyclic nature of many job markets.</p>
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<p>Sadly, for most students (and parents, by extension), the main, and sometimes only, incentive to go to college is a job. It is, alas, the be-all and end-all of higher ed for most. But college is supposed to be an educational experience on top of vocational training, although college is and will remain for the foreseeable future, partially, vocational training, and it could become a trade school in the future if it isn’t already, although I hate the direction that some colleges are taking.</p>
<p>But some majors are golden tickets only because the ones who graduate from these “golden ticket” majors are among the best and brightest.</p>
<p>Is physics a “golden-ticket” major? (I know physics is employable and is often seen as a “second-choice” major for many entry-level high-tech/IT jobs, but how often do that “second-choice” major land one such job?)</p>
<p>It would be more interesting to see a study about the salaries earned by top administrators in public education and the correlation to where they earned their degrees. </p>
<p>This might boost the enrollment at the mediocre academic factories that are producing all those resident geniuses who work as superintendents and principals. Well, that is until they are arrested.</p>
<p>Really? Top public ed admins got their degrees from subprime Us?</p>
<p>If they were former teachers who got their degrees from subprime Us, maybe that could account for the presence of some of these subprime U graduates at the top of the public ed food chain.</p>
<p>Or the person who deliberately downshifts for other reasons. You’re not “less successful” of a person if you have a kid with special needs and therefore decide to take on a less challenging (and less well-paid) job that you otherwise would have. Of course, for some people on here, it’s all about the Benjamins.</p>
<p>Top public ed admins is not exactly the same as top administrators in public education. If a further clarification is needed, look at the mention of superintendents and principals and think more public K-12 than State [fill the blank] University. </p>
<p>And yes, to answer your question, sub-prime universities are the main purveyors of the mediocre Ed Doctorates and Masters.</p>
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This conveys some information but suffers from being a biased sample – unemployed students living at home will not be eager to report that.[/.quote]</p>
<p>Unemployed students living at home are ONLY doing so because their parents are allowing it. Coming home after graduation and living on our dime was simply not allowed for our oldest and it won’t be for two or three. We gave S1 a 6 months post graduation deadline of funding for a college graduation present in 2011…and guess what he found a job.</p>
<p>It bothers me on some level that it feels like sometimes people want a “strategy” and really what someone else is earning is meaningless to what my kids are earning. You can find tons and tons of “range data” by major. I think it’s fine if the feds can figure out how to harness other people’s data and plop it in the website but I’m not sure how constructive it is…any given graduate is either going to be somewhere on the range or living in the parents basements if allowed.</p>
<p>Of course this is true. But I presume that having special-needs kids is a random factor that is not dependent on college major (setting aside, perhaps, some chemical or nuclear engineers). So the inclusion of people like that in a survey shouldn’t make it impossible to compare groups, because all the groups should have about the same percentage of special needs kids, if the sample is large enough. The things I am worried about are things that distort the comparison because they aren’t randomly distributed.</p>
<p>The joke is colleges themselves being afraid to be measured. </p>
<p>It would make for an interesting twist in the student interview: “I see here you have been graduating a lot of baristas- you want to tell me about that? And why does half of the Anthropology department work at a car park?”</p>
<p>The usual caveat is “no guarantee”, not “no indication”.</p>
<p>In any case, those concerned about the post-graduation prospects of various majors would be well advised to look at surveys over several years to capture economic and industry cycles. Unfortunately, older data is quite sparse, as even many of the few schools that show survey results only started doing them recently.</p>
<p>I took it to mean that perhaps there is a higher level of special need kids born to chemical / nuclear engineers who were exposed to something dangerous/ teratogenic during the course of childbearing. I don’t think it was meant snarkily, but I could be wrong.</p>