@intparent: You claimed there is “not any focus at all on any kind of career preparation,” which is demonstrably false. Your D’s s experience during her overnight visit does not trump the Common Data Set and the experiences of the actual students.
It was accepted student visit days… you would expect them to put their best foot forward. That is what they decided to promote.
For the vast majority of students, choice of major likely has a much bigger effect on post-graduation career directions than choice of school, assuming that the school has a decent degree program in the desired major. But for those aiming for jobs at elitist employers (e.g. consulting, investment banking), the choice of school may be more important. Another situation may be that pre-PhD students’ choice of school can be important in that the school’s department for the major needs to be well regarded enough by PhD granting departments that the student may later apply to.
College kids are very idealistic, especially ones coming from nice families who will take care of their rent, bills, etc as they pursue their grad school dreams or take time off enjoy being post grads - if they don’t have a job (or have a very low paying one). Its the kids that can’t afford the high priced college, and graduate with a low/no employable degree, because they were studying what they loved, that I feel bad for. Those kids should read these articles and go in with their eyes wide open. I know plenty of art history, film, psyc, marine bio etc… .kids that regret their choice because of being underemployed. Perhaps LAC foster less marketable majors?
Seems to me this thread displays an awful lot of pitying of LAC grads who mostly, in my experience, don’t feel sorry for themselves or regret their choice of school or major—nor, in the main, do they regret the conscious choices that many of them have made to devote their careers (or at least the early part of their careers) to generally low-paying but psychically rewarding public service work. In fact, most LAC grads I know are much more fiercely loyal to their alma mater than graduates of research universities.
I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of the weight US News places on alumni giving rates in its rankings, because IMO much of this is just a reflection of variability in the efficiency with which the alumni office tracks and puts the squeeze on alums for donations. That said, however, I think you’ve got to be impressed by the fact that 43.2% of Swarthmore alums give to their alma mater. As do 56.9% of Williams grads, 49,2% of Amherst grads, 54.2% of Bowdoin grads, etc. In contrast, only 35% of Harvard alums give to their alma mater, along with 33.6% of Yale grads, 35.5% of Stanford grads, 36.8% of MIT grads, and 21.5% of Caltech grads. Again, without reading too much into it, I think the LAC giving rates at a minimum suggest that many or most LAC grads have sufficient disposable income to allow them to give, and that they feel pretty warmly toward their undergraduate alma mater.
As for earnings—well, the only real data we have are from the US Department of Education, which are early career earnings only (10 years after beginning undergrad education, so typically 6 years after graduating). Those data say the average Swat alum 6 years out makes $49,400. I’m sorry, that’s not exactly starvation wages for someone 6 years out of college. Especially if you consider that many will be coupled up by that time and have a combined income of $98,800—some higher, some lower, of course. At age 27 or 28. Others will still be pursuing advanced degrees at that age. Sure, the average salaries of Penn grads 6 years out are higher, at $78,200. But 9% of the undergrad degrees Penn awards are in engineering, and 21% in business (Wharton), so the skew is largely major-based. Controlling for majors, there’s probably little difference between the earnings of Swat grads and Penn grads. And it’s not as if people go to Swat naively thinking they’re going to study engineering or business,
I know oodles of young people living in NY and DC and Boston working for non-profits or the government and somehow having a nice life on their earned salary with zero parental support. Since when does it require 90K in salary for a 22 year old to live? Even paying on their loans- a kid who doesn’t need to own a car (since paying to park, insurance, etc. really is prohibitive) and doesn’t need a fancy loft apartment and doesn’t need to eat out every night and doesn’t think their life is over if they can’t go skiing every weekend or to Aruba for New Years- that kid can cope just fine.
I’m not into pitying a kid who graduates from a place like Swarthmore and decides to work in the not-for-profit sector. Especially the “prestigious” not-for-profits- which are in essence like a paid apprenticeship. I’ve got nieces and nephews who have done TFA, some of the think tanks, staffed various Congressional offices and committees, and even living in high rent places like DC and NY they manage to pay their loans every month.
But they all learned how to cook- that seems to be the key. They’ve got friends who quite literally eat every meal out. That puts quite a dent in the checkbook. And they’ve all had roommates.
These earning studies are notoriously unreliable. People don’t respond to them, especially high earners.
These schools have very high alumni giving rates and huge endowments in large part because their graduates earn high incomes. Whether they report or not to surveys is another story.
True re: surveys, but I think the salary data people are referring to on this thread are the figures provided by the federal Department of Education on its College Scorecard web pages, which are derived from the actual tax returns of graduates 10 years from when they first entered college, which typically would be 6 years after graduation. There are two important limitations on that data: first, Scorecard uses only the one-time snapshot, but presumably for many alums earnings continue to rise over the course of a career, and second, Scorecard tracks only the earnings of recipients of federal financial aid, which may not be representative of the earnings of all alumni.
I suppose a third limitation is that alums could be massively under-reporting their earned income to the IRS, but let’s not go there.
It is interesting to me that there seem to be two camps of views:
- Yes, LAC students end up earning less, but they are happy with their choices and knew that before the went there, because everyone has known that forever. Why did someone waste time to research a well known fact?
- It is not really true that LAC grads earn less. The information is suspect and there are many successful LAC graduates.
I think that there is some truth to both.
@bclintonk The survey information can’t come from tax returns because there is no connection to college attended. And, if it is based on financial aid filings, then it is certainly unreliable for many reasons.
Here is a much more telling stat published last month by Forbes which goes to the ROI of college attended, IMO.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2015/07/29/top-50-roi-colleges-2015-grateful-grads-index/
Take a look in the chart in the article linked above. The giving rates at the top LACs, and how much alums are giving on a per capita basis, is pretty extraordinary. Frankly, it belies the survey data suggesting supposed lagging earnings for top LACs.
Excludes full-pay students.
Take a look at College Scorecard yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s not so hard for the feds to match up the data. The Department of Education has the Social Security number of everyone who has ever filed for federal financial aid, and the schools and degree programs for which they sought financial aid. And the IRS has the Social Security number of everyone who has ever filed a federal income tax return–well, at least going back as far as enactment of Social Security–and pretty definitive data on the earned income of those persons by year. Except to the extent people misstate their income on their 1040s, which of course is a rather serious crime, though no doubt some people do it.
It’s a little creepy that they do this, though from their description it sounds as if no one at the Department of Education actually sees the names attached to individual tax records. I imagine DoE sends over the Social Secuirty numbers for a “cohort” (e.g., federal financial aid recipients first enrolling in Swarthmore College in September 2004), the IRS pulls the tax records for those individuals for 2014, “de-identifies” the records (i.e., deletes names and Social Security numbers from the electronic file, which should be a fairly simple operation), and sends the data over to DoE. Either the IRS or DoE “aggregates” the data, i.e., averages the earned income within that cohort.
"1. Yes, LAC students end up earning less, but they are happy with their choices and knew that before the went there, because everyone has known that forever. Why did someone waste time to research a well known fact?
- It is not really true that LAC grads earn less. The information is suspect and there are many successful LAC graduates."
Or 3. One realizes that what is important (insofar as money is concerned) is whether you’re happy / content / can live with the money you earn, and the presence of people who earn considerably more is just of no relevance whatsoever. I make less than investment bankers and neurosurgeons, but so what? I don’t want to be an investment banker or neurosurgeon. More power to them if they make seven figures. It doesn’t change my own satisfaction with what I get paid.
The Forbes data are interesting, but I’m not sure they’re “extraordinary.” At Swarthmore, for example, the median alumni donor gave $13,671 over a 10-year period. That’s an average of $1,361 per year. Generous perhaps, and certainly more than I give my alma mater, but less than DW and I give our church, and I’ve never thought of us as extraordinary donors. In fact, when I run the comparisons on TurboTax, it always says our charitable deductions are slightly low for our tax bracket, which gives me a twinge of conscience for about a minute until I go back to writing the check for the April 15 Estimated Tax payment.
Note also that the Forbes data are for all alums, at whatever stage of career or life. The federal income data reported on Scorecard are only for 10 years after first enrolling in college, so usually 6 years (or less) after graduation. Most people are nowhere near their peak earning years and have accumulated only modest assets 6 years after graduation. (Let’s see, 6 years after graduation I was working as a VISTA Volunteer, living on a salary of about $9,000, and had a net worth of probably less than $2,000). I’ll bet if you could break out alumni contributions 6 years after graduation, the median figure would be well below the figure for all alumni, as the latter figure includes donations by people in their peak earning years, and those who are at the peak of lifetime wealth accumulation, and those in their golden years who may be looking to spend down some of their assets in their last years, and regard their undergraduate alma mater as worthy of their support. It’s also not clear to me whether what’s reported here is annual giving only, or also contributions to endowment, e.g., in a major capital campaign; and for that matter, whether it includes testamentary gifts as well as gifts made while living.
In the big picture you’re right, though. Alumni giving by LAC grads hardly suggests a lifetime of privation. So to that extent, the 6-years-out snapshot of earnings provided by Scorecard appears to be a highly misleading figure.
I don’t understand what this preoccupation is with salaries and average salaries, and what other people earn, etc.
If people feel money is so important, why don’t they just go out and do something that doesn’t depend on what “someone” is willing to pay you?
I don’t know that alumni contributions are always a great measure. Harvey Mudd used to have pretty poor alumni giving participation. Honestly… I think it wasn’t a very pleasant place to go to school if you go back 25 years. In recent years they have loosened up the core curriculum (which seems kind of funny, as it is still very rigorous, but it used to be more extreme), provided more student supports, worked to improve student life in general, offered more combination major options, and worked toward a better gender balance. I think the recent alums are MUCH happier with their Mudd experience, and are giving more. And the earnings of that entire alumni pool is pretty high – so you can’t just equate high salaries with high levels of giving.
I completely agree that you can’t “equate” the two, But I think you can reasonably infer that if a high percentage of alums give generously, that’s an indication that many alums are doing well financially. On the other hand, you can’t infer that a low rate of giving implies a lack of wealth, because, as in your example, it might just be that wealthy alums are unhappy with the school and/or with their own experience there. To use some perhaps old-fashioned terminology, substantial income and assets are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for generous alumni giving.
“I don’t understand what this preoccupation is with salaries and average salaries, and what other people earn, etc.”
The wealthier your family is, the less that this is a concern. For students in families that do not have much money, choosing a career that provides good job opportunities is much more important.
A college grad in my family got laid off from his job, and is now working on an auto company assembly line. I am pretty sure that is not what he had in mind when he chose his major.
Just as important as salaries are employment rates and underemployment rates. There needs to be more transparency so students can make more informed decisions about education.
That might be your perception, but I don’t think it has much basis in reality.
I know lots of people who grew up poor and don’t put money first. In fact, wealthy people might be even more interested in holding status.