The Truth Behind College Placement Rates
On any given college tour for incoming freshmen, the college placement rate is the money shot. How do you sell a four year program that’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to a young person? Tell them you have a 95% placement rate. BOOM! Moneyshot, baby! Your investment is guaranteed to pay off. Ignore the fact that the average college student leaves university with between $25,000 and $30,000 in debt. Pay no mind to the fact that nearly half of all graduating college students say their degree wasn’t worth it. With that 95% placement rate, you’re guaranteed to slide right into that sweet job you’ve always dreamed of.
Not so fast. I recently emailed the Alumni Association at my old college because I was curious about how these rates were being calculated. What I discovered shocked me.
First of all, all numbers used for the statistic are pulled from a voluntary post-graduation Alumni Survey given a year after graduation. This means that the only people reporting are the ones who both signed up for the Alumni Association AND volunteered to complete a survey one year later. Essentially, you’ve already not only weeded out most of your graduates in this process, but you’re also selecting for the graduates still interested in participating in an alumni survey. I was told this rate for my college was 40%, which, again, means 40% of the (n)% of students who joined the Alumni Association.
So, the sample size is small. Big deal. You should still be able to extrapolate pretty accurately, right? Maybe. But what are you extrapolating? Let’s dig deeper. The placement rate at my university, as it is at may universities across the country, is a combination two different groups: those who have found employment (hurrah!) and those who decided to go back to school.
Back to school? Yes. Placement rates are clearly presented to many incoming students as a way to think about the return on their investment, yet includes those who are actually doubling down on their investment. There are certainly a number of careers where a Masters degree is a logical next step, but for many graduates moving into graduate school is a way to defer their mounting debt and escape a job search that’s turned up empty. The statistic makes no distinction between the two groups.
Surely the employment rate is solid, though. Right? Well, it almost certainly tells us who’s getting a paycheck, but the statistic actually tells us nothing about what they’re doing for their paycheck. Rolled into the employment statistic is any graduate who, after a year of being out of school, is doing some kind of work. It says nothing about whether or not that student is working in the field they studied for or whether or not they met their original employment goals. (Even worse for my college was that about 20% of the students there were in ROTC and were essentially guaranteed jobs in the military upon graduation.)
The process for doing placement rates may vary from college to college, but I believe that, for the most part, they’re pretty similar in that they roll in continuing education and make no distinction in employment type or quality. For many, this may not even matter. College may be a necessity for them based on the career they’re trying to obtain. However, most students or prospective students, particularly those in the non-STEM fields, must not treat college as a sort of guaranteed back up plan. Based on the realities of college “placement rates” I feel comfortable in saying that for many it’s more like a $40,000-$80,000 coin toss.
Originally published at College Free Careers.
