Does anyone know of any studies that take into consideration labour-force dropout as well? It's a bit less enlightening if you compare the 95% of science grads who are employed doing science with the 60% of soft studies grads (both numbers purely hypothetical), to compare the most career-driven X-students with all the Y-students is unfair to Y-studies.

Tenored professorships are nicely paying, hard to get but exist in every discipline (let's pick on Gender Studies) so if 2/100 GS grads become 100K/year tenured profs and 98/100 opt out of the labour force, you're really measuring the wrong thing.

I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations.

The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going off of the data presented in that talk.

On the same note, I've never used payscale.com for more than a glance. Their methodology sounds valid, but I don't know how they make their money.

I bet you have some tremendous selection bias going on.

I bet they only looked at the english majors who still had a job in the field after many years. If you include all the english majors, including the failed ones who work in a different field then the numbers might make more sense.

Definitely, it's from an AACRO conference which is full of collegiate registrars and provosts. The message may ignore contrary data to get a political agenda across. Until I can review the actual reports the argument is based upon, I can't really say for certain. To truly analyze the information across the nation the feds will have to create a US student tracking and lump it in with K-12 & IRS data. There's a quiet movement to do so - but there's resistance to that idea hence the discussion. Resistance stems from the orwellian aspects while proponents trend along "we spend federal dollars on these diplomas, we need to make sure they're doing GOOD for the society somehow." A figure quoted at the same talk was that we spend 3% of our GDP on education.

I didn't say I agreed with what was said, it's just something that higher ed is talking about at the top of the greater organization and was worth a mention.

Personally I feel state academia is bloated and backwards and many changes need to be made. Admissions should be highly curtailed where the whole nation makes an effort towards math and science instead of 'getting a degree so you can get 10k$ extra starting out.' I'm still not convinced that the federal dollars lost to defaulting loans wouldn't be better spent on k-12 education.

Payscale make their money by helping companies figure out what salary ranges to offer in new markets, offering benchmarking and other compensation guidance.