There has been a sharp reversal in the market. Law school applications are up again and competition for candidates from top law schools is up!
I think my points are that outcomes play out over decades. 4 year out data is meaningless- the person is still fairly junior. In professional and corporate settings the real money (if you are fortunate to be in an industry that is doing well) is 7-10 years out when(if) you make partner and/or get serious stock options. I have several friends who were involved in an IPO in their 40’s which none of them could have predicted entry level.
“It seems like Chicago’s data is easily accessible…”
No, it is not.
Four year data of employed alums would include first year corporate law associates with $160k-180k base salaries. If it was meaningless why would colleges like Yale go through the trouble of collecting it in such transparent detail? I think it’s very insightful. And very appreciated.
@writermom2018 - the data you linked to from Yale doesn’t provide specifics about where students go to obtain JDs, MDs, etc. Am I missing something? There’s lots of data on the types of jobs students get (e.g. what industry), but where’s all the info on where - specifically - the Yale grads are going? I’d love to know how many Yale grads go to Yale Law or Harvard Law or whatever, but it’s not there… Am I missing something? There data doesn’t seem to provide what you seek from the Chicago data.
To be honest, I think the reason might be reorganization more than UChicago trying to cover anything up.
Until very recently, UChicago career services has been…uh…subpar to say the least. They have been completely rebuilding it from scratch over the past 5 years or so. It takes time to build the infrastructure necessary to have detailed employment statistics - figure out who is responsible for the data, where to store the data, what questions to ask, when to send post-grad surveys etc. Currently, they have all hands on deck trying to get every single undergrad an a career advisor (something they didn’t even do when I was a first year, so I’m reasonably confident they are still building up the program), expanding Metcalfs, improving UChicago Careers In… Programs, Dougan Scholars/Trott, etc. etc. They are prioritizing their time and effort, and I doubt this is their priority right now.
I was surprised to find that undergraduate departments don’t keep statistics on which phd programs undergrads go to, and I seriously doubt it’s cause they are embarrassed of outcomes. They just don’t have the infrastructure in place to check and log it and never thought it was worth doing so.
I think the OP is highly misguided. Incomes after graduation are related to three things:
[ol]
[] The talent of the students coming in.
[] The selected fields of the students.
[li] The ability of the college to attract recruiters from high income occupations.[/li][/ol]
Let’s start with #3. I am pretty sure that all the consulting shops and finance companies actively recruit at UChicago now. As do the top CS companies. So if a student wants a high-paying job (outside of engineering), they can get it at UChicago just as well as they can elsewhere.
And the fact that these companies recruit actively speaks to #1. Clearly the recruiters that the student body has the talent base for these competitive high pay jobs. So then, it is reason #2 why the typical UChicago student does not make as much money as perhaps the typical UPenn grad.
I believe the same thing plays out at Harvard and Yale. Yale grads seem to choose careers that pay less.
“Until very recently, UChicago career services has been…uh…subpar to say the least. They have been completely rebuilding it from scratch over the past 5 years or so. It takes time to build the infrastructure necessary to have detailed employment statistics - figure out who is responsible for the data, where to store the data, what questions to ask, when to send post-grad surveys etc. Currently, they have all hands on deck trying to get every single undergrad an a career advisor (something they didn’t even do when I was a first year, so I’m reasonably confident they are still building up the program), expanding Metcalfs, improving UChicago Careers In… Programs, Dougan Scholars/Trott, etc. etc. They are prioritizing their time and effort, and I doubt this is their priority right now.”
This - UChicago career services being subpar - was an issue that several current students mentioned to my son during the Admitted Student Overnight. @HydeSnark - do you see that the services are improving quickly enough that you will benefit from them? What things do they still need to do to be helpful?
The College must do some sort of employment survey as they list the top companies kids are landing at. The lack of transparency beyond that is odd. Emailing a grad survey isn’t rocket science.
@milee30 Yeah, absolutely. I have personally been helped a lot by their advisors and the Metcalf program especially. I don’t think they’re sub-par at all right now. I have no complaints and job prospects among people that go here anecdotally seems pretty in line with other elite schools, if not better.
But they clearly aren’t satisfied with where they are and every year aggressively court more funding, more opportunities, and to continually expand their programs. I don’t think stopping to rest and reflect is on their agenda yet. Maybe if they decide enough kids are deciding not to come because of their lack of comprehensive outcome reports, but I seriously doubt that’s currently the case.
I mean it is run by Nondorf after all. Same ethos as in admissions. Is UChicago admitting impressive students? Yep. Is Nondorf still never satisfied with where we are and driving towards higher and higher selectivity? Yep.
@hebegebe That’s all well and good but there is a tremendous disparity between incomes at Harvard/Yale and Chicago. Can that be explained by differences in the % of STEM students? I don’t think so. Even Brown beats Chicago handily in this area and Brown isn’t exactly known for its pre-professionalism.
The college’s career office should solicit help from Booth.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago
My S received a long letter from career services introducing themselves. It states that he will “begin to engage in Career Advancement during First Year Orientation.” It says that a dedicated career adviser will work with him throughout his time in school. It also mentions an early key program Taking the Next Step, UChicago Careers In program, among others. Maybe this is their way of ramping up or at least keeping up their career services programs?
@JenniferClint The article you reference has nothing to do with outcomes or salaries, what it does have to do with is which colleges have most economically diverse class (based on parents income). In this case UChicago has a much less wealthy cohort then Harvard/Yale who admit more students from the top 1% of income than UChicago by a long shot. Personally I find that a very commendable thing.
Of course the admittance and acceptance of one Rory Gates will probably skew that average parental income up by quite a bit.
@uocparent Yes, they didn’t give everyone a dedicated advisor as recently as a few years ago. Taking the Next Step has been around as long as I’ve been here, though, but I think they made it bigger and have been continually tweaking it.
@writermom2018 They do send out an employment survey. They send out the same employment survey they’ve been sending out for years*. And they publish the results. You are just not happy because you think it’s not in-depth enough.
To once again hammer in the answer to your initial “why” question: it really, really, really looks like they inherited the survey from CAPS (Career Advising & Planning Service, UChicago’s much less snazzy pre-2012 version of Career Advancement) and no one has thought it is worth the time to change the survey to ask for detailed employer and salary data and to sort through the data and present it with snazzy graphics while they were changing literally everything else about career services here. It may not be “rocket science” but takes a bit more effort than “emailing a grad survey.” (which they already do, as you seem to be unwilling to believe for some reason that I do not fathom)
If you want to contribute to helping them decide it is worth their time to do so:
Step 1) Be a high schooler and get in
Step 2) Go somewhere else
Step 3) Send admissions a long angry letter explaining that you didn’t go because they didn’t give appropriately detailed outcomes information
Alternatively be a New York Times Op-Ed writer and write a long angry hit-piece accusing UChicago of not appropriately providing a good RoI or hiding the exact number of McKinsey Consultants UChicago is producing (or not producing), but I can’t imagine why any of them would care so much and they’re all too liberally minded to think money matters that much.
Personally, I don’t really care and think these kinds of outcome reports are just going to make them want to push people towards early career high paying jobs which they really do not do very much right now: Career Advancement’s support for people wanting to go into the public sector or academia is really great and it would be a pity if they had any more institutional pressure against it than they already do. UChicago grads are getting jobs, Career Advancement does a pretty good job…personally I don’t think things need to change much.
*seriously, you can see that the results on the 2016 survey are basically exactly the same as the survey they were sending out before Career Advancement existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20130214062626/https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/about/outcomes-data
@JenniferClint , these figures won’t easily be rectified by counselling and whatnot - they reflect the nature of the kids who have historically come to the University of Chicago (a) from families of less wealth, and (b) with aspirations less focussed on accumulating wealth, than the kids of their coastal peers. This may be shocking to some, but to most of us it’s just fine. It has always been a characteristic of students at the University of Chicago. If snob appeal and a desire to make lots and lots of money are what a kid aspires to, I hope that kid avoids Chicago.
So according to nytimes link above, amongst 12 highly-selective peers, age 34 salary, UofC is in distant last place with $61,700.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago
Amongst all US colleges 96th. Why this low? That’s 12 years after college. I don’t think regional bias as Northwestern is 46th with +$10,000 gap & Notre Dame is 28th in nation, +$17,000 gap.
How do you grow an endowment with that outlook? And I’m not sure that’s feasible when the college is now north of $75,000 a year. Maybe 40 years ago when you could paint houses in the summers and work part-time at the library to pay for school it wasn’t a priority, but modern ask makes salary prospects top line.
@writermom2018 you should have led with this if that is your point.
Here is the more disturbing thing from this article:
“A new study, based on millions of anonymous tax records, shows that some colleges are even more economically segregated than previously understood, while others are associated with income mobility.” How anonymous are they if they know where you did your undergraduate degree? I’ve never filed that nor have I ever submitted a data set that would contain both my tax record and my undergraduate institution. How do they get this information? How does one get their hands on millions of anonymous tax records?
@HydeSnark you have properly applied Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is probably correct.
@writermom2018 But the gap is almost completely explained by UChicago taking in poorer kids than its peers. The story is consistent, UChicago takes in poorer kids and without the advantage of having engineering (which is the most equalizing major: all you need to get a well paying job after graduation to be smart and while test scores correlate with income once you’re at a selective school, if you’re poor, that correlation goes away since everyone has good test scores), manages to help them become richer.
Still that data is very old relative to UChicago’s institutional changes and I doubt it bears much resemblance to outcomes now - or the student wealth distribution.
What’s really interesting is Brown takes the highest income kids and turns them into one of the lowest paid groups.