Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, cites said North Carolina’s program as one of the best at showing the value of a degree.
Amid the sluggish economic recovery, many families are wondering how best to make their increasingly expensive investment in college pay off. North Carolina’s public universities and community colleges have tried to provide an answer, by releasing the average salaries earned by students according to their major and campus.
A handful of other states, including Texas and Florida, have released similar data, and two-thirds of the states have received federal funding to track the progress of individual students from kindergarten to the workplace.
The figures may help sway students who don’t have a firm career plan, said Kelly Cravener, a 21-year-old marketing major at North Carolina State University. Her NCSU marketing peers who graduated in 2012 were earning almost $27,000 on average.
“I think a lot of people come in and they just don’t know what they want to do and they switch majors three or four times,” Cravener said as she scanned the web site outside the campus bookstore.
North Carolina’s website links student college records with salary information collected by the state’s unemployment agency. It shows what someone with say an anthropology degree is making after graduation and up to 10 years later. Students also can see a breakdown of the different salaries earned by anthropology graduates depending on which of the state’s 16 public universities they attended.
Federal funds linking data on individual children starting as early as pre-kindergarten to later earnings started during the Bush Administration and expanded with the 2009 stimulus package. The Obama administration and legislators, including Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Marco Rubio, R-Florida, have pushed for more information about the benefit of particular degrees.
