More and more colleges are looking at how well students do after they graduate. However these data are hard to get and integrate. What have other colleges done and how has ZogoTech helped?
Unemployment Insurance (UI) records
One of our colleges was able to get UI records from the state showing how much students were making before, during and after college as well as which industry they were working in. This is the ideal in many ways.
Pros: Student-level. Very high match rate and level of accuracy.
Cons: only one of our colleges has been able to get this level of data from their state. Students who move to other states aren’t included. Only the industry is shown so if someone is working at McDonalds, you can’t tell if they are a cashier at one of the stores, or an IT administrator at HQ.
Employment verification data brokers
One of our colleges gets data from a company that does employment verification for most of the Fortune 500 companies.
Pros: they can also get # hours worked / week. You don’t have to beg the state for the data.
Cons: Aggregated data (but you can specify the aggregations — e.g. by program). The match rate is only ~20% and it’s not free (although this is probably still better than the cost and low accuracy of doing regular gainful employment surveys)
State Data
Some states (e.g. Texas) publish how well students do aggregated by CIP code.
Pros: free, high level of accuracy
Cons: aggregated so you can’t see how well low-income students do for example. Also not all states publish this info (but maybe they should!)
EMSI
EMSI has a product (Alumni Outcomes) which pulls in information from a big resume database and LinkedIn to see where students are working after they graduate. It then links that to BLS data to estimate how much money they might be making. We’re starting on a project to bring in that data.
Pros: Student-level data. Don’t have to go through the state. Can get information about specific jobs, not just industry
Cons: Salaries are estimated based on self-reported data (resumes). Not sure how accurate the matching is. If it depends on the student putting the college on the resume, then community college transfer students may get missed if they only put the university on the resume)
