US Census Bureau Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO): Masters Universities

US Census Bureau Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO): Master's Universities

Our previous post in this multi-part series on student outcomes introduced a relatively new data source from the US Census Bureau: Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO). These data provide outcome variables that include average earnings for bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates, as well as “flow” data that show in which industries graduates of different academic programs work. PSEO data are currently available for institutions from 10 partnership states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. States are at different levels of integration within the PSEO structure, as data are not available for all public institutions in each partner state. However, for the institutions included in the data, there is a high knowledge rate for graduates of those institutions. Data on the PSEO Explorer interactive website can be viewed for various degree levels (bachelors and masters), cohorts from 2001 through 2015, earnings percentiles, years post-graduation (1, 5, and 10), and academic programs. For further exploration, the PSEO Explorer is a great tool for drilling into the employment outcomes data for specific institutions.

Whereas the previous blog post explored PSEO data for Carnegie classified Doctoral institutions, this post looks at earnings data trends for public Master’s Colleges and Universities within the PSEO data. There are three Carnegie Classifications of Master’s institutions: Larger Programs, Medium Programs, and Smaller Programs. Based on the Carnegie Classification descriptions page, “Institutions were included in these categories if they awarded at least 50 master’s degrees in 2016-2017, but fewer than 20 research doctorates.” Program size is delineated based on the following: larger programs awarded at least 200 master’s degrees; medium programs awarded 100-199 master’s degrees; and smaller programs awarded 50-99 master’s degrees in 2016-2017.

Earnings Data: Bachelor's Degreeholders from Master's Institutions

As in the previous post, we will be concentrating on average earnings for bachelor’s degreeholders at the 50th percentile. Average earnings are for all cohorts across all instructional programs. The time-points measured in the PSEO data are for 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years post-graduation. The default view for each visualization below has the institutions sorted from highest to lowest in the first column that represents “Year 1 Average Earnings (50th Percentile)” as shown at the bottom of the column. The second and third columns are “Year 5” and “Year 10” earnings respectively, with the fourth column representing the “percentage (%) change from year 1 to year 10” at each institution. The overall averages are weighted averages based on the number of graduates employed in Year 1 of the data. The color-coding of the bars is based on the institution’s percentage change value in the fourth column, with darker colors representing less change than lighter colors with more change over time. The visualization can be sorted using any of the four columns by hovering over the column label at the bottom and clicking on the “filter” icon that pops-up.

The group of visualizations below shows each of the three Carnegie Classifications of Master’s institutions separately: Large Programs, Medium Programs, and Small Programs. The Master’s Institutions: Smaller Program group is included in the visualization set below, but there are no Texas institutions included in this group, so we will not be summarizing that smallest group of institutions.

Master’s Institutions: Larger Programs

For Year 1 Average Earnings, Colorado State University-Global Campus graduates had the highest average earnings at $53,770, with Grambling State University graduates having the lowest average earnings at $24,184. The overall average in Year 1 was $34,484.
For Year 5 Average Earnings, CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College graduates had the highest average earnings at $62,059, with Adams State University graduates having the lowest average earnings at $38,289. The overall average in Year 5 was $49,295.
For Year 10 Average Earnings, CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College graduates had the highest average earnings at $77,211, with Adams State University graduates having the lowest average earnings at $44,170. The overall average in Year 10 was $59,561.
For the percentage change from Year 1 to Year 10, SUNY College at Cortland and State University of New York at New Paltz graduates increased by almost 116%, with the University of Houston-Victoria having the smallest percentage increase of 29.2%. The overall average percentage change was 77.6%.

Master’s Institutions: Medium Programs

For Year 1 Average Earnings, University of North Texas at Dallas graduates had the highest average earnings at $39,512, with State University of New York College at Potsdam graduates having the lowest average earnings at $24,327. The overall average in Year 1 was $29,367.
For Year 5 Average Earnings, State University of New York Polytechnic Institute graduates had the highest average earnings at $55,449, with Southern University at New Orleans graduates having the lowest average earnings at $36,230. The overall average in Year 5 was $44,642.
For Year 10 Average Earnings, State University of New York Polytechnic Institute graduates had the highest average earnings at $66,515, with Southern University at New Orleans graduates having the lowest average earnings at $43,003. The overall average in Year 10 was $54,161.
For the percentage change from Year 1 to Year 10, State University of New York, College at Oneonta graduates increased by 107%, with the Texas A&M University-Texarkana having the smallest percentage increase of 37%. The overall average percentage change was 89.7%.

NOTES: If you are unable to read the labels in the visualization below, we recommend clicking the “Full Screen” button on the lower right of the visualization window to enlarge the information. Hovering over each bar will provide a tooltip with additional information.

Comparison between Earnings and In-State Employment Rates

Another data point included in the PSEO data is the count of graduates who were employed within the state where they earned their bachelor’s degree. By dividing this in-state employment count by the total number of earners, we can determine an in-state employment rate. In the PSEO Technical Documentation, the researchers indicate that “mobility and higher wages are positively correlated” (p. 10), which would mean that the higher the percentage of in-state employment for a university, the lower the average earnings would be for their graduates. To examine whether this statement was supported by the data on Master’s-level institutions, we plotted each of the Master’s Colleges and Universities in the PSEO dataset using scatterplots with “Average Earnings” on the x-axis and “Percentage Employed In-State” on the y-axis, as shown in the visualizations below. The institutions are color-coded based on their state, and each time-point (Year 1, Year 5, and Year 10) are plotted in separate panels. The trend line through the data points is considered to be the “line of best fit.”

Master’s Institutions: Overall Trends

The trend lines in each scatterplot below represent the general correlation between higher mobility (lower in-state employment rates) and earnings. There appears to be an interesting shift from Year 1 to Year 5 to Year 10, with the middle point showing a different trend, as the sloped line moves upward from left-to-right, while the Year 1 and Year 10 lines have downward slopes from left-to-right.
HOWEVER, notice the light peach-colored dot (NY) to the far right on each of the panels: SUNY Maritime College, one of the institutions in the “Smaller Program” category. In the Master’s-level PSEO data, this institution would be considered an outlier that is skewing the results. While not shown below, if we remove SUNY Maritime College from the data, the Year 1 and Year 10 slopes reverse to positive values, meaning that higher in-state employment rates lead to higher salaries.
For Texas public universities, most Master’s institutions are either at or above the line of best fit for the Percentage Employed In-State within each time panel. University of North Texas at Dallas had the highest percentage of in-state employed graduates in the Year 1 panel (97.6%), while the University of Houston-Downtown had the highest percentage of in-state employed graduates in the other two time panels (92.3% in Year 5, and 93.3% in Year 10). On average across Texas Master’s public institutions, 87.2% of bachelor’s degreeholders stay in Texas to work during Year 1 after graduation, with that average falling to 85.1% in Year 5 and increasing to 85.7% in Year 10.

Master’s Institutions by Carnegie Classification

When factoring Carnegie Classification into the equation, the Larger Programs and Medium Programs have upward slopes when all institutions are included, while the slopes in the Smaller Programs are negative at each of the time points.
As stated above, SUNY Maritime College’s high average earnings in the Smaller Programs group skews the trend downward. Removing this outlier changes all of these lines in the Smaller Programs group to the same slope direction as the other institutional groups.

NOTES: If you are unable to read all of the labels in the visualization below, we recommend clicking the “Full Screen” button on the lower right of the visualization window to enlarge the information. Hovering over each point will provide a tooltip with additional information.

So What?

Having presented the Doctoral- and Master’s-level Carnegie groups separately in two blog posts, we wanted to provide a summary comparison of both groups combined. Shown below are the same data points as presented in the bar charts above, namely average earnings (50th percentile) for bachelor’s degreeholders over time, with the aggregation level being the Carnegie Classification. The default order is from highest-to-lowest in the first column (Year 1 Average Earnings), and the color scheme is based on the percentage change from Year 1 to Year 10 as shown in the legend on the right.

General Findings

What is clear from the data is that bachelor’s graduates from what are more generally known as “R1 Research Universities” earn more, on average, at each time point in the PSEO data. The gap between these institutions and the second-highest category goes from approximately $2,500 in Year 1 to over $5,000 in Year 5 to over $10,000 in Year 10. This likely does not come as a surprise.
The other “stable” group positionally is the Master’s Colleges and Universities: Medium Programs, which ranks lowest among the six categories at each time point.
What is interesting is the movement in rankings of the other four Carnegie categories. While the Doctoral/Professional Universities group starts as the second-ranked group in Year 1, this group is ranked fifth in the Year 10 time point.
In Year 5 and Year 10, Master’s Colleges & Universities: Larger Programs moves into the second position, with the Master’s Smaller Programs close behind in third place. This is due in large part because of SUNY Maritime College in the Master’s Smaller programs category. SUNY Maritime College actually has the highest average earnings of any institution in the PSEO data for Doctoral- and Master’s-level institutions, which is the primary reason why this Carnegie Classification ranks third out of six categories in Year 5 and Year 10.
Based on the percentage of change from Year 1 to Year 10, Master’s Medium programs has the highest percentage change over time at 89.7%, with Doctoral/Professional Universities category having the lowest percentage change at 57.7%.