Rising college costs and growing student debt mean that families are increasingly concerned about the value of attending a specific college and the salary prospects for new graduates.
Many families and students seek financial benefits from pursuing higher education, which is typically known as a return on education. While it’s fairly easy to calculate the cost of attendance, economists say it’s harder to quantify future outcomes. But there are some determining factors for ROE, such as by undergraduate major or college choice.
“We’ve been hearing students say that return on education is increasingly important in their college choice,” says Dana Strait, principal of EAB, an organization that provides college enrollment services and conducts an annual survey of college freshmen. “There’s certainly been a growth in students saying that they want more information about majors and minors, saying that costs are more important.”
Since the Great Recession, Strait says students have become more interested in career-focused majors, such as computer sciences, business, engineering and nursing. Unlike a liberal arts degree, these disciplines prepare students for specific careers.
[Read: Top 10 College Majors That Earn the Highest Salaries.]
College grads who study areas related to STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — tend to earn more in their early careers compared with those in the humanities, several studies show.
“Students are really seeking out firm evidence for a particular program or particular university to provide that type of career success straight out of college,” Strait says.
Until recently, prospective students couldn’t access information on what graduates from different institutions earned on average. PayScale, a Seattle-based online salary information company, paved the way in 2010 with its annual College Return on Investment Report, which is based on self-reported data from online users. Since then, search tools and websites for finding alumni salary data have proliferated.
For prospective students and their families looking for alumni salary data, here are few resources as well as guidance on how to evaluate information from these tools.
[See: 10 Strategic Ways to Pay Less for College.]
The Education Department’s College Scorecard data is available online. In 2015, the Obama administration revamped the College Scorecard to create a more user-friendly tool for families looking for data on schools. The tool allows users to compare the cost and value of different colleges.
Some of the data provided on College Scorecard includes graduate outcome information, such as the typical salary alumni from a particular institution earn 10 years after they graduate.
Higher education experts say the College Scorecard is an important asset for prospective students to learn about post-graduate salaries from an individual college.
“The government pulls it directly from IRS data — it’s a very objective data that doesn’t rely on surveying,” Strait says.
Google now features the government’s College Scorecard to aid users in navigating their college search process. The tech company said in a recent statement that it’s trying to make the government’s data more publicly available and present it in a clear, user-friendly way. So if a prospective student conducts a Google search, College Scorecard information about admissions, cost, alumni salaries and more appears.
But higher education experts say there are some problems with using College Scorecard’s alumni salary data in projecting a student’s future earning potential. For one, the data is pulled from only those who borrowed federal student loans to pay for college.
The College ScoreCard alumni salary information also doesn’t provide a complete picture since it lumps the earnings of all the institution’s graduates, who have different types of degrees, into one outcome, says Matt Soldner, a principal researcher in higher education at the American Institutes for Research.
[Read: Expectations for Paying for College, Grad School in 2019.]
A few states have web tools that show college outcomes. AIR’s College Measures works with several states, including Colorado, Florida, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas, to provide state-specific Launch My Career websites that show the potential return on investment at in-state public and private colleges. These websites are interactive and include more granular data, breaking down the projected earnings by major from a specific college.
For example, if a user is looking for an advertising course in Florida with the best outcome for earnings, the University of Florida tops the list among institutions in the state that offer this discipline. Average earnings and other information, such as average cost of a degree, are also displayed from a search. In this instance, a Gator alum can expect to earn slightly more than $350,000 over 20 years with his or her degree.
Some universities publish their alumni salary data. “There are few different ways to find this information, though it is more difficult than is should be,” says Nick Ducoff, founder and CEO of Edmit, a college admissions firm that provides families with information about net costs for college.
Some schools partner with companies that track labor data, such as Burning Glass Technologies, to make alumni salary data available through published reports, he says.
Other schools partner with other agencies. The University of Texas System partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau to release its online product seekUT.utsystem.edu in March, which shows post-graduation employment outcomes at UT’s 14 institutions. It’s the first school system to partner with U.S. Census Bureau for college graduate data outcomes, says Soldner.
“Until now, this sort of information was unavailable by program and at a national level,” said Stephanie Huie, vice chancellor for the UT System’s Office of Strategic Initiatives in a March press statement.
Other universities are likely to follow UT System’s example, experts say.
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How to Find a College’s Alumni Salary Information originally appeared on usnews.com
