<p>Lots of things could be helpful to many, but I don’t think we need legislation for all of them. To me there are always unintended consequences.</p>
<p>Probably the most effective means of making the universities release this stuff would be to lobby US News to incorporate it into their rankings somehow. Then see how fast these schools start disseminating this stuff. In fact, I think the business and law schools already have this in the ranking data. A consumer could assume that any school that failed to supply the data had some reason, since successful schools would likely be happy to report this information.</p>
<p>“Surveying” is so much easier said than done. Penn spends a bundle on its survey; it’s five times as good as anything else I have seen. But they still only get about a 70% response rate. And in lots of majors, where you might only have two or three graduates a year, even a 100% response does not give you statistically valid information unless you maintain it for years.</p>
<p>Duh. But… whose biology majors are making the most and doing the best after graduation? This is not about comparing across majors, IMHO. It is about comparing across colleges.</p>
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<p>The colleges almost all benefit from keeping us in the dark. They do not want a light shone on the actual results of what they are selling. They benefit from their graduates heading into the labor and grad school, and NOT reporting the results of their four years there in those pools. I can’t believe sometimes that we are such sheep about paying & borrowing big bucks for college, and no one actually thinks this information should be collected and reported. Caveat emptor? I am TRYING to be an informed consumer on this, and the data just isn’t available in any form I can get at except via anectdotes. Now there is a great way to decide how to invest $250,000…</p>
<p>I think it would be good to just know how kids do immediately upon graduation – job, no job, grad school lined up, fellowship lined up, or home to mom and dad. </p>
<p>I think the mid-career income data is interesting and may be indicative of the stronger college networks out there but mostly I think it’s good to get a sense of how well universities promote their graduates into employment, grad school or fellowships. I’m not sure this is so much a function of what goes on in the classroom as in Career Services.</p>
<p>BTW, I’ve been pleased by the help our college graduate got from his college. But my sense is that lots of families feel as if colleges took a lot of their money and then left their kids to fend for themselves in trying to get a job.</p>
<p>I smell a business opportunity for a statistically oriented CC poster. The data is mostly there already- I see a big upside for someone who can crunch and analyze the numbers in a way that other parents would pay for.</p>
<p>I would volunteer my own services except that as an ancient history major, I am too busy running a large function of a global corporation to participate. I would worry that my comp would skew the data – but since my college friends who studied Renaissance History, Comparative Literature, yes, Anthropology and Philosophy are now a corporate CEO, head of a major movie studio, and head of oncology for a major teaching hospital (all of whom out-earn me by multiples) I guess I don’t need to worry about the outlier effect.</p>
<p>The relevance of what they studied in getting them to hit their stride professionally in their 50’s is a mystery to me- but since all of you seem to find the data highly relevant in guiding your 17 year olds into a college and a major, if there’s money to be made here, I suggest a CC’er take this on.</p>
<p>My OB/GYN studied music performance in college. He wasn’t “good enough” (or so he claims) to make it as a classical musician, so he went to med school. He was not the only one in his class to enter a profession- several ended up in law school, MBA programs, etc. So a parent looks at the data on music performance majors and says, “Hey, median salary after 20 years at college ABC in music performance is 250K! Sign Roger or Susie up ASAP”. Do none of you realize the fallacy in this? If 10% of the class is employed as music teachers, choral directors, leaders of "Mommy and Me’ classes at the YMCA, etc. (thereby pulling down the average) and 89% end up as litigators, physicians, or corporate honcho’s (with 1% working as classical music performers)… does the presence of the data (OB/GYN’s make more money than music teachers, Duh) really help you make a rational decision on your Roger or Susie’s prospects?</p>
<p>I don’t believe that at all. I have a much happier life than my ancestors who were working their fingers to the bone just to put food on the table. I think you’re romanticizing the past to think that there was some golden era where times were simpler and people were happier.</p>
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<p>Society is hardly living by the principles of “grind away at marathons and don’t eat anything with fat on it.” There’s plenty of mindless indulgence in society. (See: Kardashian, Kim)</p>
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<p>What if it is? Nothing prevents my kids from moving into a rural environment, working on a farm and having lots of children themselves. That’s their life; as long as they are self-supporting, it’s not for me to judge. </p>
<p>I will note that my history-loving son is VERY service oriented, and I anticipate he will be a public servant in the true sense of the word. </p>
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<p>Well, yeah, duh. Which is why I"m giving them the gift of an excellent education. What they do with it is up to them. I can urge them to consider the marketability of what they do, but I’m not going to be the kind of parent who forces a kid into an area he or she has no interest in.</p>
<p>No colleges left me in the dark about D1’s employment options. I wasn’t using them as an employment facilitator. Like PG, our gift has been the extraordinary education. Like Blossom, D1 is a history major subset and highly qualified for a biz career. (Assuming she gets off her bum.) She’d also make a great professor. Or program manager. Or talking head.</p>
<p>There’s a little bit of “can’t figure it out” thinking going on here. Do you really need to know x% of humanities majors at an elite got what jobs? Versus y% at another tier? OR: that your kid developed the personal skills to find a career path?</p>
<p>The kids who benefit already have a career path in mind- and the skills/qualifications to manage that track. A nursing major can and should pick the best program out there. Same for an engineer. If the work field requires internships, a practicum, research experience, etc, find the colleges that offer those. And the right level of peer competition. If the jobs require work experience during college summers, get your kids out there doing that. </p>
<p>Or do you also want the govt to mandate reporting on internships, who had what summer work experience, who did significant research-- eventually coming up with a model, good for that instant? And, there would need to be some disclosure- this is what our x grads to today, but the govt predicts a trend toward outsourcing, the competiton may impact starting salaries in 4 years, tech advances may eleiminate this job, etc? How much has to be spoon fed- esp considering stats are out there, right now?
Some of this responsibility lies with the buyer.</p>
<p>I think it’s more than a little amusing that the usual government-is-too-big-and-intrusive suspects want to create large databases of these things, and the usual progressive liberal types are mostly “eh, people know this already.”</p>
<p>Everyone out here (me included) has anectdotes about people who did not end up working in the field of their major, and some who had “low paying majors” who ended up in high paying jobs. But I think seeing the data in aggregate (not anectdotes, but statistics from several year’s results) would be very telling. If a higher percentage of a given major end up working completely outside their field, that telle me something about that program.</p>
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<p>Really? Where can I find the 5 & 10 year results (job fields, salaries, grad school admissions, leaving the field) for Physics majors from a half a dozen different universities? Even universities that do this polling don’t always release their numbers because it is not in their best interest if they don’t look good.</p>
<p>And I think it’s delicious that the no regulation or law is too absurd crowd is SO distressed that the Ivory Tower is going to be asked to report in a coherent, meaningful manner on what exactly their extraordinarily expensive and inflationary tuition is providing to their students that the world at large deems valuable enough to pay them for.</p>
<p>If a high percentage end up working outside their major, WHAT does that tell you about the program? what does it tell you about how educated, eg, my D1 has become, her critical thinking, analytical, research and writing skills? And her interpersonal strengths?</p>
<p>Who is this “no reg is too absurd” crowd? Aren’t those who note the overhead trying to point out to the “no more big govt” folks what all this means? Envision it. Not just the part about having the results handy-dandy.</p>
<p>A few larger schools do seem to get large enough samples of survey respondents in their career surveys. Take a look at the career surveys at Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, and Virginia Tech. Even some smaller schools like MIT and CMU seem to get enough to put up reasonably useful data in their career surveys.</p>
<p>No one made you send your kids to 2 Ivy League schools at full pay. You could have sent them to your state univ or comm college if you were worried about payout / payback.</p>
<p>You’re sort of skewing my posts. First off, I am glad I sent my kids to the schools they attended. Very good investment in all respects. Second, I don’t think anyone is insisting that kids should earn a living in the field they studied in college as some sort of indicator of educational success. Just earning a living will be fine. :)</p>
<p>But yeah, I do think it’s fun how outrageous some seem to think this reporting requirement will be. After all! These are PhDs!! Too funny.</p>
<p>This would be a handy time for Bel to parachute in with a link to such a study. </p>
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<p>The impression I get from the article I excerpted is that this is data which is already being gathered at the state level. I suspect they are being a little over-optimistic, but the theory is that this is data that the various levels of government already have it just needs to be coordinated and made available. Its not alleged to be a labor intensive mandate on the schools.</p>