IHE: $50k as average starting salary for new 2018 college graduates

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/07/16/stagnant-wage-growth-new-college-graduates

Before you get too excited,

(A) These are survey results, so people who are unemployed and not happy about it probably didn't fill out the survey.  Whereas people in fields that tend to get recruited before graduation tend to earn higher salaries, leave forwarding addresses, and answer surveys, at least in my experience as a person tasked with administering the survey at my college.  With the handful of respondents, even Super Dinky College looked great because most of the respondents were BSN nurses making $50k-70k/year.

(B) About 20% of bachelor degrees awarded are in business [1]  with an average starting salary of $52k [2]. I can't find numbers right this second on what percentage of those new bachelor's degree recipients in business are over age 25.  However, in 2016-2017, slightly more than a quarter of first-time graduates were over age 25 [3, figure 2].  From my experience, business is a popular major for those who are returning to college hoping for a promotion/raise upon completion of that bachelor's degree.

(C) Health professions (12% of degrees [1], a BSN starting mean salary is $55k [4]) and engineering (6% of degrees [1] at $67k [2]) tend to also be high salaries right out of college and also tend to be choices for people already working who return to school to get a promotion/raise upon earning the bachelor degree.

(D) For those who want to dig a little by field, Employment Outcomes of Bachelor's Degree Holders by fields, ages 25-29 [5] has some bar charts.

(E) Of possible interest to some members of this community since I'm thinking about new graduates now, people who already had master's degrees show up in the 2016-2017 reports with 4k new bachelor degrees, 3k new associate degrees, and 20k new certificates [3, table 1].  People are going back to school to learn new things even with graduate degrees in their first choice fields.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/07/16/stagnant-wage-growth-new-college-graduates
[3] https://nscresearchcenter.org/undergraduate-degree-earners-report-2016-17/
[4] https://www.nursingprocess.org/bsn-salary/
[5] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_sbc.asp

[Hibush]

One of the odd things about the labor economy the last few years is that unemployment has been low, but there has been little wage growth. The data in item D (Employment outcomes for new graduates) bears this out for 2017. Apparently there has been a little movement in 2019.

This disconnect from normal economic models is especially apparent in human service fields. Social work, human service and elementary education are right at the bottom of the pay scale. Nursing is the one sector that pays better. These fields also have the lowest unemployment rate, at 1%. Economists would predict a lot of upward salary pressure in this situation, but instead we see increasing disparity.

[Puget]

First job or even five years out seems misleading to me compared to looking longer-term. In my fields (psych/neuro) for example, a lot of the majors are bound either for PhD, MD or other allied health programs, often after a couple of years in a research assistant type position at a university or academic medical center lab, and followed by postdocs/residencies. The MDs certainly will end up making plenty of money, and the others will be just fine, but it will be probably a decade on average before they start really earning. Certainly you need to factor in opportunity cost during that time, but you need a longer time window to get an accurate picture.

Others knowingly choose lower paid fields like social work or teaching, not because they don't have other options but because they have values other than making money. Harder to quantify of course, but a more meaningful question would be whether graduates have met their own goals for their career, however they define success (clearly, I'm a psychologist and not an economist!).

[polly_mer]

Harder to quantify of course, but a more meaningful question would be whether graduates have met their own goals for their career, however they define success (clearly, I'm a psychologist and not an economist!).

Yep.  The Higher Learning Commission has that more meaningful question as part of program evaluation:

4.A. The institution demonstrates responsibility for the quality of its educational programs.
1. The institution maintains a practice of regular program reviews.

2. The institution evaluates all the credit that it transcripts, including what it awards for experiential learning or other forms of prior learning, or relies on the evaluation of responsible third parties.

3. The institution has policies that assure the quality of the credit it accepts in transfer.

4. The institution maintains and exercises authority over the prerequisites for courses, rigor of courses, expectations for student learning, access to learning resources, and faculty qualifications for all its programs, including dual credit programs. It assures that its dual credit courses or programs for high school students are equivalent in learning outcomes and levels of achievement to its higher education curriculum.

5. The institution maintains specialized accreditation for its programs as appropriate to its educational purposes.

6. The institution evaluates the success of its graduates. The institution assures that the degree or certificate programs it represents as preparation for advanced study or employment accomplish these purposes. For all programs, the institution looks to indicators it deems appropriate to its mission, such as employment rates, admission rates to advanced degree programs, and participation rates in fellowships, internships, and special programs (e.g., Peace Corps and Americorps).

Reference: https://www.hlcommission.org/Policies/criteria-and-core-components.html