This article comes from the Campus Contributor Network. Over the course of the semester, students from across our campus outreach program will analyze their school’s finances and assess the overall return students see on their educational investments.
After digging through the University of Pittsburgh’s budget, tuition, and student debt, it’s time to look at the University of Pittsburgh post-graduate outcomes and what students can expect to get in return for their investment.
What happens after the cap toss?
According to the Class of 2015 post-graduation placement data report (including graduates from Summer 2014, Fall 2014, and Spring 2015), 54 percent of Pitt graduates were employed full-time. While this number is somewhat promising, it begs questions: Who is the other 44 percent? What is the University of Pittsburgh doing to ensure employment opportunities for this group?
A large section of the non-full-time workers is the 22 percent of graduates continuing their education and only four percent of these graduates claimed that they were “not employed and seeking employment.” So that initial 44 percent number isn’t quite the total that it initially seems.
These numbers were further broken down by school. For example, Graduates of the College of Business Administration had an optimistic outcome; 81 percent of these gradates indicated that they were employed full-time. Comparatively however, only 47 percent of Dietrich School of Arts and Science graduates were employed full-time.
An interesting item is that 70 percent of graduates from the Swanson School of Engineering successfully found a full-time job. Ironically, the school’s rate of six percent of graduates “not employed and seeking employment,” is tied for the largest relative to the other school’s percentages. The School of Education was also at six percent for this mark, and had the lowest number of employed full-time graduates at 9 percent. This may have had something to do with the School of Education’s 44 percent rate of graduates continuing their education full-time, the highest such mark.
Post-grad incomes
Whatever the percentage of unemployed graduates may be for the Swanson School of Engineering, these graduates take the cake when it comes to median reported salary. At $62,000, engineering graduates have the largest median salary after graduation. Who follows?
The College of Business Administration and the School of Nursing are tied for a not-so-close second place. These median salary for these is $48,000 after graduation. After this ranks the School of Information Science at $45,000, while the School of Social Work graduates have the lowest median salary at $30,000.
Resources for students
What does the University do to increase these employment statistics for students? As students, one of the things that is constantly drilled into our heads is to get an internship; it turns out that this push actually has some truth behind it.
According to an article in Forbes from 2013, “69 percent of companies with 100 or more employees offered full-time jobs to their interns.” The article continues to state that you have a seven out of 10 chance of being employed by the company for which you interned.
Pitt’s Career Development and Placement Assistance Center offers a unique internship boot-camp-like process that guarantees that students who complete “the Internship Prep Program and related requirements are guaranteed placement in at least one internship or other experiential learning opportunity during their undergraduate career.”
This guarantee is promised through the completion of workshops including topics such as resume building, networking and interviewing, in addition to individual appointments to coach you through follow-up etiquette, interviews, and more.
Connecting to business
Another step in the right direction to finding a career is more exposure to employers. Pitt seeks to help increase this amount of interaction between students and employers through the numerous career and job fairs it holds throughout the year, including: a Student Employment Fair and Career Fair in September, a Majors and Minor Expo in October, and a Grad and Law School Fair in November.
The list expands into the spring semester with a Spring Career Fair in February and a Summer Job and Internship Fair in April. Employers at these fairs include companies like American Eagle Outfitters, Giant Eagle, PNC Financial Services, and UPMC.
Takeaway
Even still, when it comes to college and its corresponding debt, many people are considering if it’s still “worth it.”
Though it is hard to definitively answer this question, statistics tip the scale in favor for college. “Over a lifetime, a bachelor’s is worth $2.8 million on average,” wrote Anthony P. Carnevale, Director of Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, for U.S. News and World Report. In addition, Carnevale continues that a worker with a bachelor’s degree earns about 84 percent more than workers with just a high school diploma.
Cecilia Elena Rose, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, sums it up nicely when she states, “In general, if you compare the costs to the lifetime benefits of a college degree, it is clear that for most student the degree is well worth the time, cost, and effort.”
Yes, college is a “long haul.” Yet, we endure that “long haul” to make the longer haul, our futures, better than they would be without it.
Have something to add to this story? Comment below or join the discussion on Facebook.
Header image: Google reuse
