Does a significant percentage of college leavers forgo paid employment to perform unpaid child or eldercare?
I think the site would be greatly enhanced by a FAQ that explained the methodology and gave some tips on how to understand and use the data. This should be clearly linked on the fist page.
I like the site - particularly the data on earnings that was not easily accessible to the public before.
It would be nice if the scorecard could display the % of graduates with STEM degrees since that influences earnings. Also, it would be nice to list the percentage of students that go on to earn their doctorates as some measure of undergraduate instruction quality.
Data on the % of students earning STEM degrees and % of graduates earning doctorates are available from IPEDS and the Survey of Earned Doctorates.
I would love to see any study that links these two things. Complete nonsense.
“Also, it would be nice to list the percentage of students that go on to earn their doctorates as some measure of undergraduate instruction quality.”
That is much more a measure of the desire of the student to earn a PhD than it is the quality of instruction.
So are the earnings. Unless you compare earnings from the same field, it’s meaningless even if you accept that earnings represent success. And that after we also accept the earnings of federal aid recipients represent the overall earnings of grads. We are accepting unverified “truth”.
I like this, but it doesn’t easily answer the question: is it worth it for my kid given our family income?
“Advance to Graduate Education: The Effect of College Quality and Undergraduate Majors”
Other factors being equal, college quality has a significant effect on graduate education [and outcomes].
From: The Review of Higher Education
Volume 28, Number 3, Spring 2005
pp. 313-338 | 10.1353/rhe.2005.0030
Cited 91 times according to Google Scholar
I’d suggest “collapsing” certain data after its point of diminishing returns. For example, if “x” personal income can be estimated as being a good and sufficient income by a reasonable standard, then increases beyond this point should perhaps be considered, but in diminishing proportion to the magnitude of the increase. With respect to this particular metric, this would reduce the penalty effect for colleges which produce graduates who work in rewarding but not necessarily particularly lucrative occupations.
Hi @fallenchemist - thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. To your question: we recognized that there is great value in the colleges and universities who serve students from all backgrounds and provide them with a quality education at an affordable price, and that spending more money and excluding more students are not necessarily signs of quality.
We’re seeing important signs of progress in the questions people ask and the results that students and schools are concentrating on.
But we want students and their families to know (to the extent we can know it now) what a school’s former students earn. We want them to know whether an education at a particular college will, in the short run, enable them to pay off their student loans, meet their expenses, and get on with life. And we expect and encourage the higher education community to complement this project with information for students and families about other aspects of college quality and performance, including student learning outcomes, career choices, public service roles, the history and missions of different institutions, and other considerations that will help students make wise choices to advance their education goals.
Hope that is helpful - thanks again!
Here’s another study linking PhD attainment and undergraduate origin.
Siegfried, J. J., & Stock, W. A. (2007). The undergraduate origins of PhD economists. The Journal of Economic Education, 38(4), 461-482.
The 25 American undergraduate alma maters that generated the most economics
Ph.D.s between 1997 and 2003 are reported in Table 3. The list obviously is dominated by
[top] research universities that offer a Ph.D. in economics.
Nothing you cited is convincing, and “other factors being equal” is virtually never achieved. So for economists an LAC has poor teaching because not a lot of their undergrads go on to Ph.D.'s in economics? Don’t you think selection bias from the start plays a huge role there? BTW, 91 citations since 2005 is not a lot IMO, and also who knows how many of those citations are critical of the study? Sorry, but IMO pure garbage. But thanks for responding.
I understand what you are trying to do, I think. And I appreciate your response. However, although I disagree with this on several levels, let’s take what you said as a given, since arguing philosophical differences is not appropriate in this forum.
I would then suggest you find a much better name than a “scorecard”. Scorecards are for showing who are winners and losers. Sure, there are lots of other pieces of information that can go on a scorecard, and they all potentially contribute to the final result. But in the end that final result is who won and who lost, as designated by who got the most points. You are saying by the very title that there are winners and losers, and that the final score is who got the most money after graduation. Sure you have debt there as well, but I would respectfully say that most people will only see the income number. At the least, showing some kind of ratio or average payback period might at least lend the impression that what you are trying to do is provide a guide to how crushing (or not) that debt burden is.
But a scorecard implies, or even more than implies, that this is some kind of final result that trumps all. Again, winners and losers. It completely ignores that life is more than a simple game where you pick up the bats and gloves after nine innings and go home. It really is a terrible name that I think sends exactly the wrong message.
@TedMitchell - thank you. Well said and it makes total sense. We realize this is 1.0 and the Scorecard will continue to improve over time.
The scorecard is a big step forward in that it shows actual salary data (not just self reported) for a large number of colleges. As others have said, further improvements could be made by breaking out salary by major, and also salary by degree level. For example does the data we currently see combine salaries for undergraduate and graduate degrees? Including average number of years to complete a degree by major would also be useful.
Overall the website is a good start and hopefully will be improved over time.
+1 This data can weed out the vilest profiteers, for which hurrah !
However, beyond that it does not have sufficient detail to distinguish between schools.
Also as midatlmom and others note, based on this data a school like Colorado School of Mines is going to be a top pick: but its salaries are really engineer salaries, not School of Mines salaries.
The numbers are particularly inflated by petroleum engineers graduating straight into six-figure jobs (of course all those jobs have disappeared now with oil at $45/barrel). Similarly the numbers for a college like Pomona are a measure of its stringent admissions policies, not a measure of its value.
I’d like to see some notes on the website to explain the limitations of this data.
It is a great improvement over the NPC to exclude loans from the ‘financial aid’ numbers. It is just asinine of the NPC to include student loans as ‘aid’, the indebtedness of which will follow you to the grave and beyond.
I think it would help to report the average student age at enrollment, especially if families are trying to compare for-profit and nonprofit colleges. Ten years after graduation for a college which enrolls 19 year-olds would report graduate income at 33-35. If the average student age at enrollment is 25, ten years after graduation could be reporting income of people who are over 40. It’s not really comparing apples to apples.
I appreciate adding the information on the relative popularity of different fields of study.
This is one of the best government initiatives I have seen. A few suggestions/questions:
- Is it possible to enter more parameters in the queries for salary data? Some parameters that would help a lot, for picking colleges and research purposes:
- College Major (e.g. average starting salary of a computer science major)
- Percentile of student (e.g. average starting salary for the top 10% of graduating students earning wise)
- Minority Status
I know that some of these queries exist to limit colleges shown from the search, but they do not actually change the stats for salary (e.g. if I pick “computer science” major for the major parameter, it will only show me schools that offer CS, but will not show me the salaries of graduating students that are CS majors- it will show me the average salary of students attending that school).
- Is the data like Payscale where the salaries of students who went on to attend graduate school are not included in the data?
- The data says salaries are only for students receiving federal financial aid. This is probably not a very accurate portrayal of actual average earnings- it would be better if this were made more clear.
- Is there a public API to access this data?
P.S. @funfatdaddy This NY Times article may be what you were looking for:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upshot/gaps-in-alumni-earnings-stand-out-in-release-of-college-data.html
Crucial context is needed: include the parent household income too. That’s really the starting place.
I just want to second what @fallenchemist has been saying on this thread about the huge, huge problems of using earnings data as a yardstick for scoring colleges, so you don’t feel like there’s just one person who’s concerned about that.
Yes, earnings are an important thing to know about the bottom-feeders of the higher-ed world (in particular, that they advertise themselves on job training and attainment and then fail to deliver, sometimes spectacularly), but showing it like the new College Scorecard does shows a buy-in to the idea that the primary purpose of a college education is to allow someone to attain a particular monetary standard of living, and that decision seems wrong—perhaps even morally wrong—to me. If nothing else, it makes me wonder why the Department of Education wants to make it look like colleges that provide us with, say, artists and dancers are less successful at education than those that produce engineers and doctors.