Earnings of College Graduates

Kevin Carey reports,

The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.

But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

4 thoughts on “Earnings of College Graduates

  1. It would be useful to report and discuss separately high-ranked colleges typically attended by kids from wealthy families–who benefit from their financial support and might decide to spend a few years trying to make it as an artist or writer–from those colleges whose students do not have such a financial safety net.

    Either way, the lesson overlooked by most in the media and (seemingly) many academics is: the *marginal* value of college is very low (or if you prefer, the value of college to the marginal student–marginal in the economic sense).

  2. I would suggest reviewing the data for any effects from that portion of the population, a partner in a couple, who is working part-time, or not at all, as a contributor to “joint” income.

    The increasing percentage of female graduates, many of whom are subsumed into “joint incomes” might skew that data.

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