Understanding the Well-Being of Recent College Graduates: Income is not Enough

ABSTRACT

Given difficult economic times experienced during the Great Recession and the years following, coupled with the rising cost of higher education, there is increasing pressure by federal and state governments, accreditors, college administrators, parents, and students to view alumni salaries as the key outcome of a baccalaureate degree. Supporters of a liberal education have decried the growth of the individualistic orientation of those who insist that the main purpose of a college education is to secure a high-paying job rather than personal well-being and civic participation. This article, focuses on a series of measures of college outcomes that are proxy measures for a “great job” and a “great life,” using data from a longitudinal study of sociology majors from the class of 2012. For the relatively small number of respondents answering the third wave of the survey, being a sociology major seems to have positive implications for early post-baccalaureate life. Further, respondents who find that sociological concepts and skills learned as undergraduate majors help on the job are often more likely than others to experience positive outcomes. In general, income from jobs is not the sole predictor in most of the multivariate models, although the sample of respondents may be biased toward those who care less about income.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the thoughtful comments of three reviewers of the article drafts, along with the reviewers for Sociological Focus. Their comments improved the paper significantly. They are John Kennedy, Indiana University; Peggy Nelson, Middlebury College; Pamela Stone, City University of New York, Hunter College; and two anonymous reviewers. In addition, we’d like to thank Nicole Van Vooren Amaya for all her work throughout the project. Finally, we’d like to thank the National Science Foundation for the grant. The conclusions are our own and do not represent those of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant [#SES-1054651].

Notes on contributors

Mary Scheuer Senter

Mary Scheuer Senter is professor of sociology at Central Michigan University. From May 2002 to August 2019, she directed the Center for Applied Research and Rural Studies, providing data and analyses for nonprofit organizations, units of government, and offices within her university. She has worked with Roberta Spalter-Roth on the 2005 and 2012 Bachelor’s and Beyond studies and was a member of the Subcommittee on Employment of the ASA Task Force on Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major.

Roberta Spalter-Roth

Roberta Spalter-Roth received her PhD in sociology from the American University in 1984. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Center for Social Science Research at George Mason University where she is working on a project with the digital archive of accepted and rejected manuscripts to the American Sociological Review. She has worked as research director of the ASA, the Institute for Policy Research, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Women’s Research Education Institute. She has taught at George Washington University, American University, and George Mason University, and writes on topics including inequalities in race, ethnicity, and gender in higher education, race and gender in the labor force, research in the policy process, family leave policies, poverty and welfare.