Mapping the Labor Market Outcomes of the CSU 5

More than previous generations, today's students and parents want to make sure that a college education will lead to career success. The recent ?Higher Education Scorecard? released by the Federal Government shows how aggressively policymakers are moving to hold higher education accountable. Our current labor market outcomes project , addresses these needs by following up the labor market experience of 95,000 CSUN students and goes beyond existing government efforts to provide better, more detailed, longer term labor market outcome measures on students, whether they graduate, drop out, transfer or continue on to graduate school. Our project also measures the alignment of the campus, individual colleges and programs with the economy. Essentially, the system we have created merges transcript records with the California Base-wage File (part of the Unemployment Insurance System) to track student earnings and identify their industry of employment. Students are followed for 10 years. Their inflation adjusted earnings and industry of employment are tracked quarter by quarter and then aggregated into three summary measures. . A paper describing the project's approach has been published by the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education. The paper is available at (http://www.cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/yes-can-they-earn-living-methods-creating-effective-system-measuring-labor-market). The proposed project will build on our initial efforts by tracking the earnings and employment sectors of all students entering the five California State University campuses in metropolitan Los Angeles between 1995 and 2010, to generate labor market information down to the program level for students, administrators and policymakers and create return on investment measures down to the program level.