College students, who, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are now facing more than $1.1 trillion in student loan debt, are looking before they leap, poring over promotional materials from colleges and universities about the average salaries of recent graduates, the Wall Street Journal reports.
There’s even an organization, known as College Measures, self-described as a partnership between the American Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge, focused on using data to drive improvement in higher education outcomes in the United States. The group has built a tool, which, for several colleges and universities, including 53 four-year institutions in Illinois and 25 in Maryland, will report a median starting pay for recent graduates and several other metrics about the colleges.
If the numbers can be believed—and there are several reasons to be skeptical, including a limited ability to collect data from a big enough sample size or report the tendencies appropriately—what degree students earn and where they earn it make a difference in terms of the earning potential for college graduates. Students reportedly seek out that information and might therefore be a little gullible and accept whatever colleges give them.
“We are in many ways a black box,” the paper quoted David Anderson, president of St Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., as saying. The college has a graduating class of more than 700 and was able to collect information last year from about 92 percent of its graduates. “People are hungry for information,” he said, and schools need to share outcomes “as part of our institutional credibility and integrity.”
Getting the most out of college
Even pure academics need money to live, but for people who don’t write for the Wall Street Journal, there’s a lot more to a college education than earning potential.
Duke University men’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, wrote in the foreword to the 2012 book Getting the Best Out of College: Insider Advice for Success from a Professor, a Dean, and a Recent Grad by Peter Feaver, Sue Waskiolek, and Anne Crossman, “The authors argue that the choice of college is less important than all the choices you make once you are in college.
“You can go to an elite school and get a lousy education if you make a lot of bad choices,” he continues. “You can go to a less well-known school and come out with a superior education, if you take full advantage of what the school has to offer. (Come to think of it, there may be a basketball analogy here, too: everyone knows that a Cinderella team can make a run if they face a major program that doesn’t take each game seriously.)”
Once again, we find that people who actually work with students in our schools pay less attention to careers and earning potential—and more attention to choices, personal growth, and intrinsic rewards—than professional businessmen do.
We extend our congratulations to the Duke University men’s basketball team on a top-notch regular season and wish them well in the NCAA tournament, in which they have the third seed in the Midwest regional. Coach K, as he is known, has led the Blue Devils to four NCAA Championships, 11 Final Fours, 12 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) regular season titles, and 13 ACC Tournament championships.
His collegiate coaching record is 983-305. He has more victories than any other coach in NCAA Division I men’s basketball history, having passed former Indiana University coach Bob Knight with his 903rd victory.
