How To Find Out Graduating Class Size

For a prospective pupil considering a task-training programme, one question that tin be hard to answer accurately is: What am I likely to earn if I finish the programme?

Even if a school wanted to provide an authentic answer, the best it can do is survey graduates and hope for plenty honest answers to requite a reliable reply. Census data does provide earnings of college grads past major. Payscale gathers information on wages and education on its website, just relies on visitors to its website to volunteer data. College Measures pulls data from state unemployment insurance reporting systems to requite a glimpse of salaries at some states' two- and 4-year schools.

Only what if you're contemplating a certificate in cosmetology or massage therapy in Los Angeles or a medical assistant training programme in Miami? An obscure Pedagogy Section "gainful employment" website has some hard facts. Information technology posts earnings information for each of several thousand programs that are taken directly from paychecks by the Social Security Administration, which keeps tabs on worker'southward earnings in lodge to calculate future retirement benefits.

For many programs, the picture show isn't pretty.

Take the Newberry School of Beauty in Granada Hills, Calif. As required by the Educational activity Section, it discloses on its website that the 12-month programme in cosmetology costs $15,818. Information technology besides says that nearly two-thirds of the students took loans to pay for the schooling, that but 42% of those who completed the plan did then in 12 months, and that 79% of those who completed the program between July ane, 2013, and July xxx, 2014, got a job within half-dozen months of graduation. If you lot dig a little deeper, one finds that 28 of the 35 graduates in the Grade of '13 landed cosmetology jobs; all were working less than 32 hours a week.

The required disclosures reveal little about how much money those graduates make.

The answer, co-ordinate to the latest data on the government'southward "gainful employment" web site, is: Not much.

The 71 students who took loans and completed Newberry's cosmetology programme betwixt October ane, 2007, and September thirty, 2009, earned an boilerplate (defined every bit the higher of the mean or the median) of $12,487 in 2011. By mode of comparing, thirty hours a calendar week at the federal minimum wage of $seven.25 paid $12,090. Some cosmetologists may get tips that they don't report to the authorities. Newberry'south CEO, Deanna Jacobsen, didn't answer to requests for annotate.

A sampling of the information on the Teaching Department's gainful-employment site—which my Brookings colleague Matthew Chingos helped me analyze—underscores the lousy pay-off to some job-training document programs. We looked for places (by cypher lawmaking) where there were data on several programs in the same occupation. In the greater Los Angeles area, we found 31 schools offer certificates in cosmetology, a licensed occupation in California that includes curling, coloring and cutting hair and can include peel and blast care. Students who got certificates at some community colleges did better and paid less for their schooling, though they withal didn't earn very much: Fullerton College ($fifteen,960) and Cerritos Community Higher ($17,139). Earnings for graduates of the normally more expensive for-profit cosmetology schools averaged between $7,116 at the Cru Institute of Cosmetology & Barbering (Garden Grove) and $xv,280 at The Paul Mitchell Schoolhouse (Sherman Oaks).

Looking across the country at 671 cosmetology programs, nosotros found that boilerplate earnings at threescore% of the programs cruel between $10,000 and $15,000. Only 6 programs produced graduates whose earnings average more than $twenty,000 a year.

The wages of graduates of cosmetology programs aren't unusual. The boilerplate wages of graduates of most of the 19 massage-therapy programs LA expanse were beneath $15,000. People who earned medical/clinical assistant certificates in the Miami area earned an boilerplate of between $10,378 (MCI Institute of Technology, Westward Palm Beach) and $17,298 (Southeastern College, Dark-green Acres, Fla.). Among 443 medical/clinical assistant programs across the land, more than one-half (256) have graduates whose earnings boilerplate less than $17,000 a year. The "gainful employment" website does betoken to some programs with better payoffs: Average 2011 earnings of graduates of certificate programs in radiologic engineering and for licensed applied nurses exceeded $40,000 in several communities.

The Educational activity Department site isn't user friendly. To discover the earnings of graduates of a particular program, one must download a huge, merely hands searched and sorted, spreadsheet, and expect several columns to Column M, which is labelled "Annual Earnings (Denominator)" The site too has information on the typical almanac loan payment for graduates of each programme. Nether the federal regulations that are to have effect July 1 (and that recently survived a claiming in court), schools in which the typical graduate ends up with loan payments above a certain threshold will be barred from federal loan programs.

All this leads to 2 observations:

Ane, as the presidents of the nation's elite universities remind us frequently, the value of a college educational activity cannot exist measured exclusively by the size of graduates' paychecks. Merely paychecks are a darn adept way to measure out the value of a certificate program at a customs higher or for-profit grooming school—and some of those programs aren't worth the price.

Two, prospective students deserve good, and easily digestible, information nigh job-placement rates and earnings of programs they are considering. Nosotros're making progress on that—and the Education Section website underscores how much information the government itself has (at least for programs for which there are lots of federal pupil-loan borrowers.) Only we haven't gone as far as we tin.

A version of this post appeared on WSJ.com.