Government data shows student income and debt by college degree | Hacker News Reader

Government data shows student income and debt by college degree

wsj.com

26 pointsfedups10 comments

"The Trump administration on Wednesday published a trove of new data offering the most granular look yet at the financial health of the nation’s new college graduates. For the first time, Americans can now compare the student debt levels and first-year earnings of graduates based on what they studied, broken out by major or graduate degree program. Until now, the government has only published schoolwide statistics on debt and earnings for undergraduates."

I think most of the data is available here https://nces.ed.gov/ but have to go through some hoops to get it.

Here's an interactive tool they put up as well that doesn't look paywalled.

https://graphics.wsj.com/dynamic-inset-iframer/?url=https://...

Hard to find the data backing it, though.

Looking at that tool, though, it has some obvious problems in how they are summarizing the data. That tool only looks at salary one year out vs. total debt. That makes some professional degrees (like dentistry) look horrible when they are actually good investments, because these degrees require essentially apprenticeships (e.g. internships/residencies) where early pay is very low but subsequent pay (say for a cosmetic dentist) can be extremely high.

Fascinating!

Absolutely hilarious to see the elite schools (tried Brown, UPenn, MIT, CMU) completely blow the lesser schools (NC State, Clemson) out of the water for both lower or equal debt with higher compensation. Really puts a dent in the "it doesn't matter where you go to school for a CS degree" mentality.

Also keep in mind that elite schools have a selection bias to kids from much more affluent backgrounds. Affluent kids often have parents with friends in the industries they are entering. So take the data with a grain of salt unless they controlled for factors like that.

Really neat. Still wish I could read the article though.

Although I'll say for my university the degrees listed are not accurate.

Got stuck at the paywall -- Do they link out to or otherwise name the dataset? When my kids start thinking about what they want from their post-secondary education, this is the sort of thing I wouldn't mind having on hand.

Why even submit WSJ articles, always paywalled.

paywall.

paywall

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