<p>In the Oregonian today there was an opinion column about Senator Ron Wyden's bill called the Students Right to Know Before You Go" bill. In short it's a website that would help people figure out the relative value of various college degrees in terms of costs and job prospects. I read more about it, and this article from another local paper gives a pretty good summary. </p>
<p>I think this bill is unnecessary. I've just gone through this whole process with my daughter - choosing a college and evaluating her options and costs - and there are already excellent websites out there that answer these exact questions - what are the graduation rates, what does it cost, etc. No one can really boil the value of a particular college down to one score anyway to decide on the worth. I realize Sen Wyden thinks he's doing something valuable to help us, but is this what we need?</p>
<p>I'm not trying to have a political discussion per se - but am honestly curious what other CC parents feel about what he's proposing. Is this what we need? If you have time to read this and share your thoughts, I think it would make an interesting discussion. I know we can't list other websites here - but I found a lot of helpful ones in addition to CC when I was researching schools.. and this just seems like duplication to me.</p>
<p>My local community community college offers “gainful employment information” for its cerificate programs. They claim it’s required by federal student aid regulations. I have yet to figure out if that should apply to all degree programs or just certificates and why the difference. I emailed them about 3 weeks ago asking what percentage of graduates with a different certification were employed within 6 months of graduation and what their avg starting salary was. I’m still waiting for a response. </p>
It’s silly - yet another politician who thinks passing a new law will solve problems.</p>
<p>Why not call it the “right to open your eyes and be realistic act”, or the “right to pay attention and think act” or the “right to do the basic math act”.</p>
<p>All of the info is already available to anyone interested in it. If they’re not interested in the info, or believe that they’ll be an exception, then it won’t matter if it’s in this other form - it’ll only create another bureaucracy to oversee it.</p>
<p>I agree that students should pay attention to facts before making large commitments and so should the students’ parents who are often the ones enabling the student to attend the particular college in the particular major for whatever the cost. I just think they can already easily do this by spending a few minutes researching it on the internet - time easily taken from the time they spend on Facebook every day.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it appears that most schools do not make publicly available post-graduation outcome survey results. Many of those that do make some results public do not stratify by major or indicate percentages employed / unemployed / graduate-school.</p>
<p>It does appear that many potential students are not looking for such information either, perhaps because they are operating on assumptions that may not be accurate (e.g. “STEM major => well paid job”, but not realizing that it is not generally true for the most popular STEM major, biology).</p>
<p>Then again, the targets of this bill may be the bottom-feeding for-profit colleges, which may market inflated expectations of job placement after attendance or graduation.</p>
<p>Are people really that naive that they can’t figure out that a major in “Puppeteering” is NOT going to give you good job prospects and need a “Bill” to tell them what they should already know???</p>
<p>I personally would find such website extremely useful if it is done right. Specifically, if it showed employment statistics by major, including salary and position level (eg technician level vs professional). For kids who go to grad school such information should be posted by their undergrad institution upon their completion of graduate degree</p>
<p>And if a student completes the degree and fails to find the employment advertised, can s/he then sue for failure to deliver the goods? There would of course be a disclaimer in fine print - past performance is no indicator of future prospects, YMMV, these results are based on an 80% class attendance rate, etc.</p>
<p>On the plus side it would provide employment for lawyers, writers, printers, school administrators and the like.</p>
<p>I’m more concerned about the crazy lending and nondischargeability of the loans. As long as the “free” money is there, a lot of people will take it, whether or not there’s a web site showing it’s a risky bet. This seems to be part of human nature.</p>
<p>I agree there should be data on outcomes from colleges. I thought there were a fair number of websites already reporting that. Requiring schools to gather and make the info public - and having the govt provide the website are two different things in my view. There are a lot of useful websites out there capable of gathering the data and making it look pretty.</p>
<p>And I agree on concerns about providing funding to schools that have really bad outcomes such as a lot of the for profits. I was scanning around on the collegeresults dot org site the other day and was appalled by the number at for profit schools that had a huge percentage of their students who were Pell recipients. It seemed to me that they were almost setup just to milk that money source.</p>
<p>I think there are useful things the govt can do… this just seemed like grandstanding to me and it felt like another case where an idea really won’t do much and misses some of the real problems - like helping the middle class. I’d rather see tax credits for tuition extended.</p>
<p>I work at a public university in the IT department and support our Financial Aid department. Every few months we learn of a new federal requirement that we are required to implement or plan for. </p>
<p>While we understand the good intentions behind them (safeguard students, truth in lending, etc.) many are very difficult to implement and enforce or have unintended consequences.</p>
<p>For example, while we attempt to contact graduates to find out their employment status, many graduates never reply. How much time and effort do we need to spend tracking down former students who have moved several times?</p>
<p>There are also different rules for academic standing from the point of view of the academic side of the house, and the academic standing regulations for federal financial aid. We have a well-developed university policy on repeats; now the federal government is telling us their rules for repeats and it’s different. So we have to be aware of and inform students who are repeating a course that they can repeat it from an academic standpoint, but not receive any federal financial aid for the repeat, which then causes them to fall below full-time, which means they no longer qualify for some of their aid. It’s been a nightmare.</p>
<p>To make it worse, the regulations are passed with no understanding on what they mean in particular situations or how to interpret them in a practical way. And then we have to implement them all after we have already started awarding aid for the aid year with a reduced staff that has suffered from state budget cuts to higher education.</p>
<p>Good observation Can it be because engineering schools are able to post good results while the results for other schools are not pretty?</p>
<p>I remember seeing Biology major survey results at one of smaller SUNY schools. NO ONE of 20+ grads who responded to survey was employed in the chosen field. That was before I learned about CC, and the first time when it dawned on me that ‘biological research’ is not exactly a good career plan.</p>
<p>I do work with low income kids from urban schools, and the amount of MISinformation they are given – particularly from for-profit colleges – is awful. Most of our own kids wouldn’t be in a position to really understand the costs and benefits of a specific degree or certificate program, and low income kids – who often have parents that don’t have much educational background either – are even less prepared. Too many end up in large debt for something of very dubious value. </p>
<p>I don’t know that what is being done up in Oregon is ideal, but there are so many abuses in this area that some form of consumer protection is desperately needed, imo. </p>
<p>These kids want to work. They want degrees or certificates that will help them get decent paying jobs in the relevant field, but too many of these programs fall very wide of the mark – some don’t even provide the minimum credential required by the licensing entity. Nor do they expend much effort seeing if the students are actually qualified.</p>
<p>^^ I recently suggested to a kid who’s planning to go to a for-profit (against my advice - bit not my kid) to do the due diligence of understanding the completion rate, i.e. what percentage actually graduate, and then what the numbers are for placement within the field. </p>
<p>People can actually do fine with some of the for profit schools but they attract too many who really will never complete it and will end up owing a lot of money. That’s one of the things you get when you accept basically everyone who applies as long as they can pay. Even non-for profit schools can have this problem when their admissions are non-selective - like community colleges, etc.</p>
Students who major in biology are not necessarily planning to become biologists; students who major in anthropology are not necessarily planning to become anthropologists.</p>
<p>However, they include the less pretty results of students in other majors like biology.</p>
<p>Some other schools with engineering have much more limited or no school-specific career survey results publicly available. This includes all or nearly all other California public universities.</p>
<p>I would like to propose amendment to the bill. The schools with reasonable tuition, such as state schools, should be exempt from the requirement. Guess it won’t be long before we see the tuition going down.</p>
<p>Seriously speaking, with the cost of education the way it is, I think we all need to know what exactly we are paying for. I know some people say that education has a value in itself, regardless of employment. To which I will say, of course it does, and good for those who can afford it. Unfortunately, many people cannot, and so they need to know what is the chance of their kids finding decent employment.</p>
<p>I’ve switched “careers” at least four times in my lifetime. My first post college job (typist) was in no way was predictive of my eventual earning potential or career trajectory. Frankly, I credit a liberal arts education to the fact that I was able to be successful in very different careers–despite not having the “technical” skills to do any of them at the beginning.</p>
<p>Maybe this makes sense for certificate programs, where people are aiming for very targeted job types, but for liberal arts schools, I this could be just as misleading as than not having any information at all.</p>
<p>This bill assumes that the purpose of all postsecondary education is to equip students for employment, a highly debatable assumption from the start. </p>
<p>Instead of creating a huge new university bureaucracy to take care of the due diligence that individual parents and students ought to be exercising on their own behalf, why don’t we just accept that if job training is the primary goal of postsecondary ed for students and their parents, the best bet is to go to a vocational school? Let’s stop the cargo-cultism surrounding Bachelor’s degrees. They don’t guarantee any job and never did.</p>
<p>There are always going to be people who are rich enough or idealistic enough to study the liberal arts. If you care a great deal about job placement after four years of college, don’t do this. No need for a new law.</p>
Can it be because engineering schools are able to post good results while the results for other schools are not pretty?</p>