I have seen this claim that those who respond to these post-graduation surveys are the ones with better outcomes, but have never seen anything backing up this claim.
I found the reports at u of I very comprehensive and detailed, not just outliers are reported.
https://illinisuccess.illinois.edu/annual-reports/
Interesting part is they have very good response rate, a critical component to measure the success breadth. I do agree that for CS, concentration in HCOL area can skew the salary numbers.
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UIUC’s data is pretty good, and, even more importantly, it gives the percent of graduates who have responded, meaning that a reader knows how good the data is.
So for engineering, they have a 77% response rate, and about 96% of those are either employed or in grad school. That means that the between 74% and 97% are either employed or in grad school.
The majority of colleges, especially those which trumpet the successes of their graduates, do not actually include the response rate, but post the results of those who responded as though they were results from the entire cohort, or, at very least, a representative sample.
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Probably the most common problem with post-graduation survey reports that college post is that they do not give breakdowns by major.
There’s a reason most colleges don’t want to publish such breakdowns (even if they collected such data): it’d make some of the less popular majors they offer even less attractive to some students.
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welp, that is not a transparency. U of I discloses from LAS to Engineering and anything in between.
There is a huge amount of variation in post graduate surveys… so much so, that it is difficult to estimate trends. Instead each college does their own unique thing. Some provide a detailed breakdown by major. Some just have a single page of general stats with no breakdowns. Some breakdown by for certain sub-schools and not others, such as just school of engineering and not school of humanities. Some do not provide any earnings information. Some have detailed earnings information, but do not make it public. As an example, I’ll go through the list of colleges ranked n the composite list from the first post.
- MIT – Detailed breakdown by major including sample size, employer, and many other stats
- Stanford – Detailed breakdown by major, but not public (as far as I know)
- CMU – Detailed breakdown by major including sample size, employer, and other stats via database
- Cornell – Engineering school has breakdown by major. Some of the other Cornell schools do not.
- Harvard – Links to Crimson senior survey, which does not break down by major. Not sure if there is a non-Crimson publication?
- GeorgiaTech – Detailed breakdown by major and other factors. Outputs sample size, placement rate, and other stats via database. Apparently some of the major specific selections on the database require “FERPA training” to unlock?
- Columbia – 1 page general summary that does not break down by major. Not sure, if anything else is available?
- UCLA – Has database with a lot of information, but did not see salary by major
- UCB – Similar database to UCLA, but provides salary breakdown by major, most common employer by major, and numerous other useful stats
- UM – At least provides a breakdown by major for engineering/CS… not sure about all the other schools
Agree on the lack of consistency in reporting financial packages. Some grads may also purposely report inaccurate results, so unless the career center is verifying the offers by requiring a copy of the offer letter/email (some do), we don’t know how accurate these outcomes reports are.
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