Representatives of the University of Texas system came to town last week, touting an online data tool that shows the salaries of the universities’ graduates.
It wasn’t just the associations of peer institutions that got a look. The officials also met with federal lawmakers to register their support for a “unit record” system to track individual students during college and after they graduate.
In those meetings, the website, seekUT, was Exhibit A. The university unveiled the tool earlier this year with data for five years of graduates, from 2007 to 2011. It has since been updated to include the earnings of graduates from 2002 to 2012.
The tool allows users to see the median earnings of graduates with bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and professional degrees in nearly 400 majors. A quick tour shows, for example, that the Austin campus’s most lucrative major, by far, is petroleum engineering. Five years out, its graduates can expect to make about four times as much as graduates in the visual and performing arts.
The site also shows the average amount of debt for those degrees and compares estimated monthly loan payments to the median earnings. And it points to projected job openings in specific fields by regions in the state, allowing students to see what employment opportunities might be available for them after they graduate.
The data tool could be very useful to prospective students and their parents, who are weighing the value of a degree from one of the system’s universities, said Nancy Fairbank, a sophomore studying political science at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Ms. Fairbank, who was visiting Washington with system officials, said she was frustrated as a high-school student that there was no way to compare the affordability of colleges she was considering. Now, however, she is using seekUT to compare law schools in the system, she said. And she has even heard of students’ using the information to negotiate wages with potential employers.
The site also made a big impression with some of the higher-education associations that the Texas university representatives visited.
“They’re on the cutting edge of what is possible,” said Christine M. Keller, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “There are other products out there, but nothing like what UT has.”
Fears of Disclosure
The data may be just the example some lawmakers are looking for to press their case for more information on the earnings of college graduates nationwide.
“People on the Hill love” the seekUT tool, said Stephanie A. Bond Huie, vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at the University of Texas.
During its visit, the university team was scheduled to meet with Republican staff members from the Senate education committee and people from the offices of Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. The education committee will lead the Senate’s efforts in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Senators Wyden and Rubio are co-sponsors of a bill that would require the secretary of education to report college graduates’ earnings by program of study and state of employment.
But the bill, dubbed “The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act of 2013" (S 915), is controversial because it would link individual student records to wage data in an effort to provide students and parents with more information about the cost and earnings potential of a particular degree program.
Citing privacy concerns, some Republicans remain wary of creating such a “unit record” system, which is now banned under a 2008 law. Among the skeptics is Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who will lead the education committee if his party wins control of the Senate in November.
Private colleges have largely opposed using a unit-record system to report student earnings after graduation, fearing that the data would not paint an accurate picture of student success. “A lot of institutions are scared of this data,” said Ms. Bond Huie, “scared of what this data might show.”
Jennifer T. Poulakidas, vice president for Congressional and governmental affairs at the land-grant association, said the University of Texas was among a handful of public institutions that were overtly supporting the creation of a unit-record system.
But that number is likely to grow after the midterm elections, when the prospects for reauthorizing the Higher Education Act will improve, she said.
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for public and governmental affairs at the American Council on Education, said he was also impressed with the seekUT data. But the database would be difficult to replicate on a national scale, he said.
“I don’t want to say you couldn’t do this in another state,” he said. “It’s a model of what could be done if the federal government had the time to put it in place.”
Politicians who already oppose the unit-record concept are unlikely to be swayed by the presentation, Mr. Hartle said, but it gives supporters an example to bolster their argument.
“For people who think this is a good idea, as do Senators Rubio and Wyden, it illustrates the rich possibilities of a database,” he said.
Correction (10/14/2014, 11:02 a.m.): We mistakenly called S 915 the “Student Right to Know Before You Owe Act of 2013.” It’s the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act of 2013.” The article has been corrected.
