College graduates’ majors can affect their early-career earnings more than the institution they attended, according to a new report from College Measures, a partnership that seeks to help students and their families use data to make more cost-effective choices.
The paper, “Higher Education Pays: But a Lot More for Some Graduates Than for Others,” synthesizes previous reports by the partnership on the average first-year earnings of graduates, sorted by major, institution, and type of degree.
The paper’s analysis matches postsecondary-education information for graduates of institutions in Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia with earnings records from state unemployment-insurance agencies. The results are intended to help prospective students make more-informed decisions about where to attend college and what to study. The data also partially fulfill one goal that President Obama recently proposed: rating institutions according to the employment outcomes of their students.
As was observed in the previous studies, graduates in all five states realized disparate earnings by program, institution, and level of degree, with a college’s prestige often serving as a poor predictor.
For instance, those who had earned associate degrees in certain technical and applied-science disciplines in Colorado, Texas, and Virginia fared better, on average, than those who had pursued the same fields at four-year institutions.
Graduates of flagship campuses often did not earn more than those who had attended regional ones.
The report also described stark differences in earnings among graduates of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs, the STEM fields.
While politicians and policy makers have made the development of future STEM workers a national priority, the labor-market outcomes are uneven. Graduates of engineering, math, and computer- and information-science programs, for example, earn far more than those of biology and chemistry programs. Biology majors often earn less than English majors, according to the report.
The idea of assessing a college degree’s worth by first-year earnings is controversial because of the methodology and assumptions behind such an analysis. Critics point out that graduates who leave the state where they attended college are not included in the analysis. It also does not factor in a graduate’s earnings later in a career.
Others fault this type of analysis for being part of broader trend that they say takes a materialistic, one-dimensional view of higher education, and discourages graduates from pursuing jobs that serve the public good.
College Measures is a partnership of the American Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge, a consulting firm. The paper was supported by the Lumina Foundation and written by Mark S. Schneider, president of College Measures and a vice president of the American Institutes for Research.
