Life after graduation: Triangulating disparate data sources to describe students’ employment and graduate school outcomes

Presentation Summary

Charles Drucker and Charles Masten; University of California, Office of the President

Life after graduation: Triangulating disparate data sources to describe students’ employment and graduate school outcomes

The question of how college graduates fare in the labor market has become increasingly important as policymakers, researchers and accrediting agencies scrutinize the value of a college degree. Recently, several states have initiated projects to assess the employment outcomes of students at their public universities using state wage data. The University of California is currently analyzing some 10 million state wage data records for roughly 500,000 individuals who received any type of degree since 1999, reflecting wages earned in California between 2000 and 2011. The data management challenge confronting this project involved merging individual wage records with data from UC’s student information system, as well as data from the National Student Clearinghouse to identify recent graduates pursuing advanced degrees. In this presentation, we will discuss the process of acquiring, preparing, and analyzing these datasets and share systemwide findings on post-graduate earnings and employment for these cohorts in California. In addition, we will discuss how this data can be an asset to campuses in their student research and academic planning activities, as well as a means of evaluating results stemming from traditional methods of assessing post-graduate earnings outcomes, such as alumni surveys.