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Magic Wade's avatar

I also wanna point out that it was the Obama administration that started requiring universities to post information about how much money graduates of those universities were making with those degrees.

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Luna di Mare's avatar

Which were then gamed quite well. More than one school offered to "sponsor" unpaid internships by essentially paying the salary the organization should have been paying the worker. Suddenly, the "employed nine months after graduation" stat started looking really good.

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AmonPark's avatar

As someone тАЬin the businessтАЭ--colleges do not have good data on their studentтАЩs wages. There are three potential sources of wage data and they are all... problematic.

First: alumni surveys. The problems with these are obvious and well laid-out in the ancient statistics bible How to Lie With Statistics and the problem gets worse the smaller the subpopulation you are working with. Evaluating individual programs from these would be amazing but requires a better response rate. (Recent grads: please participate. You should get one of these about 6 months after graduation.)

Second: Unemployment Insurance Data. This is available but requires working with state unemployment agencies, and so may only include data for certain states. The UI programs usually collect data on the economic sector but not the position pf the worker--so the Walmart bagger and Walmart accountant are both Retail. It also shows wages not hours (45k, 50 hr weeks and 45k, 30 hour weeks are really different). It also sparse for the self-employed, like a lot of trades and agriculture.

Third: Third-party specialists. One in the field will scan resumes on job sites for your school name and present insights about what title they list and likely wages. This also undercounts fields where people donтАЩt post resumes (see self-employment, trades).

The feds have tax data, and I would love it is theyтАЩd use it to make those decisions (and also have a Gainful Employment rule for masterтАЩs programs because they are the next frontier for scammy for-profit programs and not just by the usual suspects.)

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Chris's avatar

Oh yeah! To try going after scammy for profit Unis. IтАЩm old enough to remember when тАЬtrying to prevent colleges from saddling students with useless overpriced degreesтАЭ was a left-leaning value.

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