A Higher Education Pays
A year and a half ago the CSU’s Office of the Chancellor approached META+LAB to develop an app that would display actual 2, 5, and 10-year median earnings information using data gathered from 95,000 students who attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN)
Although the data was complex, the requirement was simple: to build an application that presents the data in an easy-to-digest format, with high school students and their parents as the target audience.
The purpose of the app was also simple: to show the users, via real earnings data of actual students who attended CSUN, that it pays to get an education.
The result is Learn and Earn. There you can explore median earnings by major 2, 5, and 10 years after students exited CSUN. For the purposes of the application, “exited” means that a student left CSUN either without completing a degree at CSUN or elsewhere, or after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. The app also contains earnings data by industry and the percentage of students from specific disciplines at CSUN who went on to work within various industries, such as finance, utilities, and education. In this section you can explore data five years after students exited CSUN without completing their degree, after earning a bachelor’s at CSUN, or after earning a master’s degree at CSUN.
These are the top three reasons why I think this app is amazing:
- It was entirely designed and developed by CSUN undergraduate students who work at the META+LAB under the mentorship of faculty and staff.
- It takes data that has been painstakingly collected by CSUN research gurus and reported in a large dossier of cumbersome spreadsheets, but displays it in an easy-to-understand way, by major and by industry.
- Lastly, it debunks common assertions about CSUN students graduating and not earning a decent living.
As the Product Owner who led the students through the development of this app, reasons one and two underscores the success of our program and what it is all about — to graduate students who are job-ready in the competitive web development industry.
Reason #3 is of particular importance to me as a parent because, I admit, the data completely surprised me and challenged some of my preconceived notions.
As we sifted through the data and our incredibly talented and hard-working students explored various design and database architecture options to retrieve and display the earnings, we discovered many things. For example, five years after exit an Art major who left CSUN without completing a degree was making $26,065 compared to the $43,641 a student who completed his or her Bachelor’s in Art was earning. That’s a huge difference! A difference of over 67%, to be exact.
During the development process, Austin, one of the Art students working on the animation video for the app commented: “I wish this app was available a few years ago when I changed majors from engineering to art. My parents gave me so much grief! With this app I could have shown them with accurate data that I ‘was’ going to make a living doing what I love. Maybe not as much as an engineer, but I was definitely not going to starve.”
I felt utterly terrible when I heard this. I was that same parent when my older son announced that he was going to study Film & Television Production. Anything in the arts terrified me. I could not help but picture my son struggling to make a living.
I was wrong, Austin’s parents were wrong, and Learn and Earn proved it.
If you are a high school student, a community college student, a Cal State student reconsidering your major, or a parent of such student, take some time to explore Learn and Earn. Within a few minutes you’ll have important information that will help you make one of the most important decisions of your or your child’s life.
Yes, it will cost you money and time to go to college. But as you’ll soon discover, it pays to get an education.
If you are considering another CSU, look out for the CSU Metro LA version of Learn and Earn. This new and improved app will contain 2, 5, 10, and 15 year earnings data for over 700,000 students who attended one of the seven CSUs in the Metropolitan Los Angeles area. Additionally, it will contain a Personal Financial Return on Education calculator that can help you estimate your time to degree, your estimated earnings, and your return on your education investment, allowing you to make choices such as how much or how little you want to work while in school.
The new data is being gathered by the same CSUN gurus who collected the data for Learn and Earn, and it is guaranteed to pleasantly surprise you. It’s coming in the Fall of 2018, so stay tuned.
