One year after graduation, students with applied science degrees from the state’s two-year colleges earn nearly $7,000 more than graduates with bachelor’s degrees from four-year colleges and universities, according to a new study and database.
South High School junior Anesia Broomfield, 16, checks out the newly released College Measures interactive database during a news event Wednesday at South High.
Do you want to make good money right after graduation? Study computer science, engineering, medical fields or business. Want to be broke? Pursue film studies, philosophy or history.
Those are some of the conclusions that can be drawn about the initial value of college degrees from the College Measures database that was unveiled Wednesday during a news conference at Denver’s South High School.
The College Measures tool, which allows users to search by degree or by institution to find first-year earnings, is the product of collaboration between the Colorado Department of Higher Education and College Measures, a for-profit partnership between the American Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge Group. A Lumina Foundation grant funded the bulk of the project.
Do your homework
It doesn’t include harder-to-quantify information, such as happiness or job satisfaction.
“The associate’s degree is the hidden gem in American higher education,” College Measures President Mark Schneider said. “Not everyone needs a bachelor’s degree.”
Schneider, while saying a bachelor’s degree doesn’t have a lot of value in the short-term, said he doesn’t “hate” liberal arts.
“I have a liberal arts degree,” Schneider said. “But it’s a serious question about what the value of those are. You may have a lot of life satisfaction, but if you’re living in your mum’s basement and can’t feed yourself, life satisfaction could be hard to come by.”
Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, a parent of four – one now in college – said he has spent considerable time as a parent and as a college president counseling thousands of kids and families about the value of a college degree.
“I wished I had a tool like the one we’re making available now,” Garcia said. “As students and families think about increased debt load we need to provide them with the kind of information they need.”
Key findings
- Colorado graduates working in Colorado can earn, on average, $20,000 more in their early years of employment compared to a high school graduate, who earns an average of $25,000.
- Graduates with applied science degrees earn about $15,000 more than students who completed the associate of arts degree or associate of sciences degree.
- The median first-year earnings of bachelor’s degree recipients statewide is around $39,000. However, there is a wide range in earnings according to field of study. First-year earnings range from less than $30,000 for fine and studio arts graduates to more than $50,000 for registered nursing graduates.
Some of the news is not surprising. Higher demand translates into higher salaries. To that end, graduates in health and business earn more than graduates with liberal arts degrees.
But the data shows that not all business degrees, for instance, are created equal.
Take business administration, management and operations. A $20,000 difference is found in the first-year earnings of people who graduated in these fields from the University of Denver (more than $59,000) and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs ($39,000). Although part of that difference is attributable to differences in the local job markets, there is a $16,000 difference in the earnings of graduates from the University of Denver and University of Colorado Denver, both located in the same metropolitan area.
Generally speaking, graduates from the Colorado School of Mines command the highest beginning salaries – about 45 percent higher than the state median.
Graduates of private Regis University also do quite well in the labor market, with median first-year earnings about 38 percent higher than the state median. One reason for this is that Regis graduates generally are older than grads from other campuses in Colorado and have been in the labor market for years.
CU raises questions about the findings
The state’s flagship campus – the University of Colorado at Boulder – doesn’t rank highly in College Measures, with its bachelor’s degree recipients earning less than the state median salary in their first year of work.
The companion report on College Measures notes that CU-Boulder attracts a lot of out-of-state students and that many of its most successful grads may seek employment or graduate degrees in other states.
CU system spokesman Ken McConnellogue said that there are many caveats about the data. For instance, only 26 percent of CU-Boulder’s graduates with bachelor’s degrees remain in Colorado the first year after graduation. That’s compared to 80 percent of graduates from the Metropolitan State University of Denver, for instance.
Furthermore, a liberal arts degree from a reputable university has value way beyond what a graduate earns their first year out, he said.
“This is a snapshot in time,” McConnellogue said. “It can be useful, but the value of a college degree is measured over a lifetime. … It’s important for people to take the long view. No one measure can give people an accurate view.”
Furthermore, McConnellogue noted that the study was done during the recent economic recession.
Garcia and others involved College Measures said the plan is to include data that will examine earnings over three, five and 10 years to get a more accurate picture of the value of specific degrees from specific institutions.
Helping families make good choices
The point of all this information, of course, is to help students and families make the best decisions when it comes to post-secondary education and the accompanying debt. While there is no guarantee of specific earnings upon graduation, the ranges of first-year earnings listed in the tool can serve as a guide for solid financial planning.
The report cites advice from Mark Kantrowitz, an expert in student financial aid, who says that education debt should be less than expected starting salary after graduation. Even better, student loan debt should be less than 50 percent of starting salary.
The College Measures data includes college graduates from Colorado public colleges and universities and from three private institutions with records in the state’s unemployment insurance wage database, or 61,800 graduates between 2006 and 2010 representing 26 percent of the graduate pool. To be included, graduates must be employed in Colorado and earning at or above the Colorado minimum wage.
The numbers don’t capture any for-profit institutions of higher education. Nor does it include graduates who continued their education after earning a credential, including those enrolling in graduate school or transferring to another college in Colorado and who are full-time students. It also doesn’t include graduates who left the state, who work for the federal government or who were self-employed.
College Measures is also up and running in Arkansas, Virginia, Tennessee. Next month, Florida, Texas and Nevada’s websites will come online.
“States have been sitting on a treasure trove of information for a long time,” College Measures President Schneider said. “That’s one thing that has driven me crazy. All these data sit in warehouses. My goal has been to try to create data storefronts, to try to get the information out into the hands of people who could use it to make important decisions.”
Schneider said that most college-bound students and their families have one thing on their mind – good jobs after graduation.
Technical degrees a “hidden gem”
The key finding in the data is the value of associate’s degrees in technical fields.
“Most students say they want a bachelor’s degree,” Schneider said. “But if you can’t do a four-year college degree – you don’t have money or time – a two-year technical degree is something we should respect and honor much more than we do.”
There is some variation in salaries for graduates of different community colleges. For instance, the median wage of graduates from Red Rocks Community College with associate’s general studies degrees is more than $46,000.
That about $6,000 higher than the median wages of graduates from Arapahoe Community College, Pikes Peak Community College and Community College of Aurora.
Jasmine Fox-Suliaman, 16, a junior at South, said the new tool won’t deter her from pursuing her dream of studying fashion journalism and ultimately living and working in New York City.
“It’s important to have tools like this,” she said. “This is a path (that shows) what I have to do in order to survive. It gives me more insight on how I’m going to prepare for the real world. I’m going to have to learn to budget, and not buy the shoes that are my favorites.”
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This is a useful and interesting study. The CU folks are right in that it is only the first year and a first year salary can be fairly misleading in terms of lifetime earnings, nevertheless it is nice to see how schools compare. I suspect many here including me were surprised to see that CU Boulder is not very impressive. It would have been interesting to see how Colorado College stacks up on this measure. It would also be useful to know more about why Regis appears to be an outlier. The study also raises some good questions about the value of an education at a place like DU relative to CUDenver.
For those interested in some data on the long view in terms of an ROI with data on lifetime earnings (I think a better measure on this topic) http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value
Colorado College is at $35K with a 4.4% return
DU comes in at $124K with a 5.4% annual return
Regis is at $192K with a 6.3% annual return
Now the publics
UCD is at $207K with a 8% annual return
CUBoulder is at $363K with a 7.1% annual return
Mines is at at $851K with an amazing 11.9% annual return
Clearly the good publics look much better over an average lifetime of earnings.
Obviously money is not everything, I’m supporting my daughter to attend a super expensive liberal arts college on the east coast because she wants to follow her passions while learning some skills that will hopefully get her a living wage job in two years.
Hi Van – The suspected reason for Regis’ outlier status is that many of its students are mid-career types who are upping their credentials and skills to bump up to the next level of employment.
Interesting Jule, that makes sense. The puzzle is why CC has such a low ROI when other highly selective liberal arts colleges (Wesleyan, Amherst, etc not DU) have numbers in the same range as Mines.
First I congratulate all involved in getting this going and published. For decades I have been frustrated by the education bureaucracy, K12 and HE, and its focus on avoiding all forms of accountability.
Second, I do see some major needs for data clarification. Perhaps it is in the full study but from the story and list above I do not see any adjustment for family circumstances.
Having taught at CU-Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs, as well as Metro and The Colorado College it became clear to me that factors beyond college or even IQ/SAT scores do matter in terms of future success.
Students from wealthy and/or well connected families get better first jobs and are likely to be put on a fast track to success whereas first generation graduates must struggle to get a good job and move as quickly through a career. Of course some of this discrimination is also tied to race and gender. Over forty years orf teaching and working in government and non-government jobs has demonstrated that human nature tends to cause people to favor hanging out with people like themselves. Even within elite universities one can see that those that get into certain fraternities, or prestigious groups like Yale’s Skull and Bones society move more quickly and easily into the powerful and wealthy occupations and outcomes.
How much is talent and how much is connections is hard to measure. Being the first in my family to graduate elementary school, and later up through a PhD and joyful career has caused me to see both the good things of a society that reaches out to help kids like me, and the subtle barriers to an ‘outsider’ getting all of the same opportunities as the boss’s child.
For future use of this data I highly recommend adjusting or publishing some of the other correlations that might also be causality of success and failure beyond what any university can control. In 1971 I wrote a monograph for the Colorado Department of Education advocating using a Value Added Model of K12 achievement. Even back then it was clear that we needed to account for the external variables if we were to better focus on helping schools do a better job of what they do control. It took almost forty years for such Value Added Measurement to become more commonplace. Hopefully we can get to a Value Added mentality faster in measuring higher education performance.
After all it is important to better understand and help the whole person than just teach a cognitive subject. I recognize that one of the most important factors for my own success in moving through multiple layers of society was going to an honors high school in San Francisco, (Lowell). Others from my neighborhood got into Lowell and received a truly college preparatory education. Yet most of those students settled for mid-level careers, while the students of the wealthy and connected went on to higher level achievements. However, because I was an athlete I was also accepted into hanging out with team member children of the city’s wealthy and powerful. It also helped that I was white and knew my ‘manners’ since my parents were waiter and waitress at San Francisco’s highest end hotels and restaurants. They taught me the social skills to be acceptable to higher classes of families. Those weekend excursions, dinners, and social interactions taught me as much as a good cognitive education system. Hanging out with the higher end families also helped me see what higher expectations and opportunities existed for me. This permitted me to keep raising my sights throughout my career. I also learned the social and political skills that aided my career advancement and general sense of achievement.
Let this new reporting system flourish and grow into an even better tool for parents, students, and educators.
Van – Colorado College isn’t included because it’s a private school and it doesn’t participate in COF, the state college opportunity fund. The only private schools included are the three – DU, Regis and Colorado Christian – that receive state COF funding.