Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce just released a job prospects report, "Hard Times, College Majors, Unemployment, and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal." The title pretty much says it all, though the graphs within the report show the subtleties."If your major sounds like a job—engineering, for instance, sounds like you're going to be an engineer—you're going to be in better shape," said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the center and lead author of the report. But again, there are subtleties: Architects, until they are experienced, are generally out of luck when looking for work, and not all engineers have strong job prospects (civil and mechanical engineers find higher unemployment).
Employment rates, according to the report, are higher for recent college graduates than for those with less education. However, that's not a lasting trend, and the report chimes in on the hot debate around, "Is college worth it?" For researchers at Georgetown, the answer is ,“Yes, extensive research, ours included, finds that a college degree is still worth it.”
But as always, there are caveats, and again, the reports graphs highlights few. (The report doesn't tackle the issue of the cost to college, which may be the bigger issue around the question, "Is college worth it?" "It" needs to be defined.
The graphs also offer an interesting look at salaries to those individuals tracking the teacher-pay debate, as discessed in The New York Times this week. The Times has a panel of experts consider the pay of people with SAT and GRE scores in private sector jobs against the pay of education majors. For me, a look at the Georgetown numbers suggests there's far more to consider than simply standardized test scores and hours worked.
Jeffrey Keefe, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, does a nice job of scrutinizing the data for The Times: "measured cognitive ability is correlated with wages but explains little of the variance in wages across individuals and time. The only reliable comparison in this report is its starting point: there is a 19 percent wage penalty for teachers." And that's pretty much what the Georgetown report shows.
Graphics from Georgetown report.
