So I just saw an update in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the US Department of Education has unveiled a replacement for its old College Scorecard, under the same name. I haven’t had a chance to really play with it yet, but as far as I can tell it hasn’t been mentioned on the forum yet, so here’s a chance for y’all to play with it, too.
The most interesting thing, at first glance: It has post-collegiate earnings information that (according to the documentation) comes from tax returns of students who had received federal student aid while in college, which isn’t a perfect sample but at least has to be better than PayScale’s data.
Wait - “Salary After Attending: The median earnings of former students who received federal financial aid, at 10 years after entering the school.”??? So these earnings figures didn’t factor in full pay students and students who have been on institutional aid only, which is the majority? Are there more detailed data out there that explain how many students have been tracked and for how many classes etc.?
@panpacific One of the challenges they kept running into was providing salary info, guess they still haven’t worked out that issue. It’s a shame, since the federal government is the ONLY one able to provide definitive salary info (via the IRS).
Forget about “breaking down by majors”, any user with some common sense wouldn’t compare say a nursing school with a college with many different majors. It’s the sample size that is really problematic. Take Harvard and Yale, according to College Navigator, only 3% of H students and 7% of Y students take out federal loans, which comes down to about 40 students in H and 100 students in Y per class. Reporting on earnings of such a small number of graduates is pretty meaningless, and the huge margin of errors due to extremely small sample sizes can render totally invalid conclusions.
^^ That’s a value judgement you can buy in or not. (At least and after all it’s not a ranking, not any more.) But introducing biased and statistically invalid samples and then providing misleading numbers is just wrong!
Yes, it does depend on major. And debt depends on each students financial situation. If you’re receiving full Pell grant at Columbia, you likely do need to take out some loans. If you raise the % of student that receive Pell Grants, then you raise the median debt level. In other words, the institution is being punished for increasing access to low SES students.
Of course you are right on both counts, but for the first you have to admit it is troubling when the government (again!!!) tries to push the “free market” in one direction or another by putting its stamp on a certain value judgement. Especially one that I think most will agree is extremely ill advised in this case, as @GMTplus7 just scratches the surface regarding. It also strikes me as hypocritical, although I will say upfront I have not read the details. But assuming (dangerous, I know) that they were not bright enough to think about the following…
The government has various programs that they encourage people to sign up for that are very low paying. Teach for America, The Peace Corps, etc. Not only do these people earn less right away, but it would be a very reasonable conclusion that they are earning less a few years out due to the delay in getting into a career path job and their predisposition to not putting money as their primary motivation.
So which is it, Government? Fixate on earning levels out of college and ignore your marketing to be socially giving, or try and obey ones “better angels” and drag ones school’s ranking down? Sigh… Talk about your mixed messages. Sometimes even just reporting a statistic gives it an importance that it shouldn’t receive. But information is information, and I would never advocate holding it back just because it could be misinterpreted. But to then make it part of a ranking system is a whole 'nuther thing.
And many kids who go into the Peace Corps for two years following college, then enroll in grad school, thus delaying any appreciable income for several more years.
Yeah, but the feds then have the moral and ethical responsibility to highlight and 'essplain exactly what their data shows: salaries of the ‘poorer’ kids 10 years out…