Scorecard Salaries

As announced in InsideHigherEd this morning, the College Scorecard is now reporting financial information for graduates by institution and program, when there are enough samples. I used the opportunity to play what-if.

Back in ancient times, when I was an undergraduate studying math, I decided I'd need another major in order to find a job (don't ask me why I thought that), so I picked up Electrical Engineering. Eventually stayed with math, but I completed all but about three courses from the EE degree.

Here's what the Scorecard reports for recent graduates.

Yeah, I'd probably be retired by now.

Data Completeness

The data for the Scorecard comes only from Title-IV eligible students, and there is the question about how representative that is of the whole student population. A couple of years ago I compared the downloadable data from the Scorecard to the data from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which includes all students, not just Title IV. At the institution level, I got a >.90 correlation between the two. Here's a scatterplot.

This was part of a larger project to see if I could account for variation in graduate salaries by taking into account the distribution of subject that graduates had. You can find the data and code here.