That depends on whether the final rules of the classification define outcome as "getting a degree" or "getting a job in the field." If it's the former, they'll lower standards further. If it's the latter, they won't know what to do.
They are proposing to use income, since it is possible to track individually. However, there is pushback because a lot of helping professions have low pay but good satisfaction. (Paid in karmic dollars, as Gov. Jerry Brown once tried as an unsuccessful justification for low UC salaries.)
> "getting a job in the field."
Is it a failure if I take an english degree and get a job in business? Or if I take my philosophy degree and end up as a K-12 teacher? Getting a job in the field is giving into the fact that the academy is just job training and has no broader societal purpose to e.g. make us better humans or advance art, music, culture, etc.
Right and even if we do acquiesce to the idea that the degree itself acts as a sort of access to jobs, with the humanities and social sciences, it's never been a 1:1 assumption that this degree=a job directly about that field.
A lot of English majors go into law school, for example, and do very well there, not because English is job training for lawyers, but because English majors by both inclination and training engage with texts in a certain way that often does well as well in law school, and also, some of them like that application of the analytical skills they flexed in their college major.
Probably won't mean much in my state since the system decided to ignore Carnegie because it suggested that we should teach fewer classes and make more money.
I can't see how they will measure "outcomes". It's impossible for us to meaningfully track our graduates' career outcomes now. Unless they mean "degree completion" only, which we can do. It seems unfair to regional state universities like mine, who admit anyone with a pulse; of course graduation rates will be lower, the students admitted are mostly woefully unprepared to succeed in college, leading to high dropout rates.
[This page](https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/carnegie-classification/2025-social-and-economic-mobility-classification/) has more info on their planned measurement strategy (and a form to fill out if you want to provide feedback.)
>To measure outcomes, the classification will focus on students’ economic success. We currently plan to use undergraduate post-attendance earnings as reported by the College Scorecard and compare those earnings to a reference group, such as those with a high school diploma or associate degree-holders. This earnings data would be adjusted and analyzed based on the geographical and racial/ethnic composition of the student body, recognizing that students’ experiences in the labor market may be affected by their location, race/ethnicity, sex, and/or age. For those adjustments and analyses, we plan to use data from the U.S. Census.
I do not understand how Census data can say anything about students from a particular college. I also don't understand how they are going to get students to actually self-report income after they leave. Sounds like a measurement nightmare.
The Census has a new program they’re rolling out that compares college graduates with IRS data to see what people actually earn. Everything is de-identified and aggregated by major. It links BLS job classifications with CIP codes. As that rolls out institutions will have a pretty good idea what industries graduates move into after graduation, rough geographic area, and incomes.
Yes. They track individual SS Numbers. It's been rolled out to several states already (I want to say GA was one? Can't remember the others). The US government routinely interact trading SS numbers back and forth as a routine part of their operating procedures. They've done it for decades without issue, so presumably very little could go wrong.
The US government already has all that information and we all voluntarily gave it each year when we filed taxes. Also when we pay payroll taxes every week/2 weeks/month or whatever pay schedule a person is on. It isn't an invasion of privacy if you willing give the information.
We do pay our taxes and give info in order to do that. However we are not asked whether we want that very personal information shared with any third parties (e.g. Dept of Education or whomever). That requires consent, which we do not give by agreeing for payroll deductions for taxes.
The IRS isn't sharing the information with any "third parties". It's the US government sharing information with the US government. There are specific laws that govern what can and cannot be shared, and there are agreements you have to follow when you get access to the data, but it doesn't require your consent for every use.
Again, the federal government has been doing this since pre World War II. This is nothing new. Sorry if you're just finding out about this, but this is likely be in place since before you were born (assuming you're not in your 80's).
No way the Census is going to actually release individual IRS data, even in deidentified form. They'll aggregate, and fuzz everything with differential privacy. Even if they have the actual IRS records and link them to census responses, there is no way that gets released in a way that violates your individual privacy.
I'll agree that I don't love the government doing that either, but as someone who's tried to get data at the city level from the Census in rural areas, they aren't going to ever release data that is from a small area in a way that it's remotely identifiable, even if you have a valid scientific reason for wanting to use that data.
I'm not sure who's doing it, to be honest. I was in a presentation a year ago where they were rolling it out to our state. I had a LOT of 'how' questions, but it wasn't the venue for that, unfortunately.
This is all second hand, but i thought opportunity insights was the academic side of raj Chetty’s group linking tax data with census micro data. He basically put together a proposal to build a company to do it and have his various institutions fund it, and then he won the contract
I think it just means they will compare student income to median area income from census. Lots of schools already get income reporting from their students. Mine did, which was a selling point when I applied
Thanks for the link. Here is the comment I left there: I don't understand how you will actually get graduated students to self-report their income. I also don't understand how colleges like mine, who accept students who are under-prepared for college and therefore more likely to drop out than a better-prepared student, are served by this metric.
It also penalizes job categories that are in high demand and are popular with low-SES students, but have low pay (teachers etc), defining that as a "low" outcome when that outcome actually is very valuable in addressing labor force shortages (like the national teacher shortage). The same is true of Criminal Justice programs, where low-paid police officers are needed nationally. Is it a "bad outcome" that they are paid less? Is money the only measure of value?
Are they also going to adjust for major? Because an education major doesn't have the same expected earnings as an engineer, even if the programs are equally well designed and do a similar job of preparing graduates for their chosen careers.
The core problem here is that this rewards schools that train a lot of engineers, and penalizes schools that train a lot of elementary school teachers and social workers.
That's society in general, I'm afraid. Another problem with it is that it reduces postsecondary education to a job training program instead of acknowledging that education has (at least, in theory) benefits for society as a whole. Educated citizens are necessary for a functioning democracy, and some of the most impactful humans ever had very little earnings to show for their contributions. Even engineers like Nikola Tesla weren't very financially successful, let alone artists, philosophers, and mathematicians.
Right, we can't fix the fact that school teachers and social workers are underpaid. But we *can* avoid adopting evaluation metrics that will incentivize upwardly mobile public universities to shut down their undergrad education colleges and their humanities departments in order to game Carnegie metrics. It's fair to communicate the fact that some majors tend to produce higher wages. But ranking schools based on how well they avoid students going into socially valuable fields (and note that I'm not talking about predatory, for profit schools here, which are the ones that actually have the terrible ROIs) is something we can choose not to do.
This is an important point that I think ACS is open to addressing, but are looking for metrics that will allow such professions to count as "high outcome."
I mean, 4/6 year graduation rate and debt repayment are sitting right there. They aren't perfect measures, but they avoid the issues that you get relying only on income.
I can tell you as someone who has gone through periods of unstable home life, the "Carnegie method" of putting the majority of the work outside the classroom made it harder to succeed. Test focused classes after well made lectures I got A's in. Project and essay focused classes killed me. I got vastly different grades in ostensibly the same classes by swapping from out-of-class focused professors to in-class focused ones. That's before even touching how much essay based assessment is inherently an impediment to the dyslexic, regardless of accommodation. (On a related note, make your required readings PDFs that computers can read aloud people, it's a massive boon for accessibility.)
Well my school will certainly do poorly. Our largest major by a huge margin is elementary education. And the vast majority of them are teaching in k-6. But I guess that means we're a bad school?
As proposed, the assessement is designed from the outset to punish your school. Perhaps it is worth commenting on their site about the importance of elementary teachers for society, and that placing a lot of good teachers is a high outcome.
What are "outcomes"?
If they look at salaries, a school training all professors in a country will have low median salary compared to one training plumbers. :P
That depends on whether the final rules of the classification define outcome as "getting a degree" or "getting a job in the field." If it's the former, they'll lower standards further. If it's the latter, they won't know what to do.
They are proposing to use income, since it is possible to track individually. However, there is pushback because a lot of helping professions have low pay but good satisfaction. (Paid in karmic dollars, as Gov. Jerry Brown once tried as an unsuccessful justification for low UC salaries.)
Omg. At least no one has tried to justify the lower CSU salaries.
> "getting a job in the field." Is it a failure if I take an english degree and get a job in business? Or if I take my philosophy degree and end up as a K-12 teacher? Getting a job in the field is giving into the fact that the academy is just job training and has no broader societal purpose to e.g. make us better humans or advance art, music, culture, etc.
Right and even if we do acquiesce to the idea that the degree itself acts as a sort of access to jobs, with the humanities and social sciences, it's never been a 1:1 assumption that this degree=a job directly about that field. A lot of English majors go into law school, for example, and do very well there, not because English is job training for lawyers, but because English majors by both inclination and training engage with texts in a certain way that often does well as well in law school, and also, some of them like that application of the analytical skills they flexed in their college major.
Probably won't mean much in my state since the system decided to ignore Carnegie because it suggested that we should teach fewer classes and make more money.
I can't see how they will measure "outcomes". It's impossible for us to meaningfully track our graduates' career outcomes now. Unless they mean "degree completion" only, which we can do. It seems unfair to regional state universities like mine, who admit anyone with a pulse; of course graduation rates will be lower, the students admitted are mostly woefully unprepared to succeed in college, leading to high dropout rates.
[This page](https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/carnegie-classification/2025-social-and-economic-mobility-classification/) has more info on their planned measurement strategy (and a form to fill out if you want to provide feedback.) >To measure outcomes, the classification will focus on students’ economic success. We currently plan to use undergraduate post-attendance earnings as reported by the College Scorecard and compare those earnings to a reference group, such as those with a high school diploma or associate degree-holders. This earnings data would be adjusted and analyzed based on the geographical and racial/ethnic composition of the student body, recognizing that students’ experiences in the labor market may be affected by their location, race/ethnicity, sex, and/or age. For those adjustments and analyses, we plan to use data from the U.S. Census.
I do not understand how Census data can say anything about students from a particular college. I also don't understand how they are going to get students to actually self-report income after they leave. Sounds like a measurement nightmare.
The Census has a new program they’re rolling out that compares college graduates with IRS data to see what people actually earn. Everything is de-identified and aggregated by major. It links BLS job classifications with CIP codes. As that rolls out institutions will have a pretty good idea what industries graduates move into after graduation, rough geographic area, and incomes.
You mean they track individual IRS tax returns using SSNs? Because that's how you'd have to do it. What could possibly go wrong?
Yes. They track individual SS Numbers. It's been rolled out to several states already (I want to say GA was one? Can't remember the others). The US government routinely interact trading SS numbers back and forth as a routine part of their operating procedures. They've done it for decades without issue, so presumably very little could go wrong.
It sounds like a colossal invasion of privacy to me, but what do I know?
The US government already has all that information and we all voluntarily gave it each year when we filed taxes. Also when we pay payroll taxes every week/2 weeks/month or whatever pay schedule a person is on. It isn't an invasion of privacy if you willing give the information.
We do pay our taxes and give info in order to do that. However we are not asked whether we want that very personal information shared with any third parties (e.g. Dept of Education or whomever). That requires consent, which we do not give by agreeing for payroll deductions for taxes.
The IRS isn't sharing the information with any "third parties". It's the US government sharing information with the US government. There are specific laws that govern what can and cannot be shared, and there are agreements you have to follow when you get access to the data, but it doesn't require your consent for every use. Again, the federal government has been doing this since pre World War II. This is nothing new. Sorry if you're just finding out about this, but this is likely be in place since before you were born (assuming you're not in your 80's).
No way the Census is going to actually release individual IRS data, even in deidentified form. They'll aggregate, and fuzz everything with differential privacy. Even if they have the actual IRS records and link them to census responses, there is no way that gets released in a way that violates your individual privacy. I'll agree that I don't love the government doing that either, but as someone who's tried to get data at the city level from the Census in rural areas, they aren't going to ever release data that is from a small area in a way that it's remotely identifiable, even if you have a valid scientific reason for wanting to use that data.
This is the final product of Chetty’s group right? They linked with census micro data I thought?
I'm not sure who's doing it, to be honest. I was in a presentation a year ago where they were rolling it out to our state. I had a LOT of 'how' questions, but it wasn't the venue for that, unfortunately.
This is all second hand, but i thought opportunity insights was the academic side of raj Chetty’s group linking tax data with census micro data. He basically put together a proposal to build a company to do it and have his various institutions fund it, and then he won the contract
I think it just means they will compare student income to median area income from census. Lots of schools already get income reporting from their students. Mine did, which was a selling point when I applied
Thanks for the link. Here is the comment I left there: I don't understand how you will actually get graduated students to self-report their income. I also don't understand how colleges like mine, who accept students who are under-prepared for college and therefore more likely to drop out than a better-prepared student, are served by this metric. It also penalizes job categories that are in high demand and are popular with low-SES students, but have low pay (teachers etc), defining that as a "low" outcome when that outcome actually is very valuable in addressing labor force shortages (like the national teacher shortage). The same is true of Criminal Justice programs, where low-paid police officers are needed nationally. Is it a "bad outcome" that they are paid less? Is money the only measure of value?
Are they also going to adjust for major? Because an education major doesn't have the same expected earnings as an engineer, even if the programs are equally well designed and do a similar job of preparing graduates for their chosen careers.
The core problem here is that this rewards schools that train a lot of engineers, and penalizes schools that train a lot of elementary school teachers and social workers.
That's society in general, I'm afraid. Another problem with it is that it reduces postsecondary education to a job training program instead of acknowledging that education has (at least, in theory) benefits for society as a whole. Educated citizens are necessary for a functioning democracy, and some of the most impactful humans ever had very little earnings to show for their contributions. Even engineers like Nikola Tesla weren't very financially successful, let alone artists, philosophers, and mathematicians.
Right, we can't fix the fact that school teachers and social workers are underpaid. But we *can* avoid adopting evaluation metrics that will incentivize upwardly mobile public universities to shut down their undergrad education colleges and their humanities departments in order to game Carnegie metrics. It's fair to communicate the fact that some majors tend to produce higher wages. But ranking schools based on how well they avoid students going into socially valuable fields (and note that I'm not talking about predatory, for profit schools here, which are the ones that actually have the terrible ROIs) is something we can choose not to do.
This is an important point that I think ACS is open to addressing, but are looking for metrics that will allow such professions to count as "high outcome."
I mean, 4/6 year graduation rate and debt repayment are sitting right there. They aren't perfect measures, but they avoid the issues that you get relying only on income.
The SLACS who should worry about this DGAF about Carnegie classification, but if USNews said it they’d freak out. Even if they pretend not to care.
I can tell you as someone who has gone through periods of unstable home life, the "Carnegie method" of putting the majority of the work outside the classroom made it harder to succeed. Test focused classes after well made lectures I got A's in. Project and essay focused classes killed me. I got vastly different grades in ostensibly the same classes by swapping from out-of-class focused professors to in-class focused ones. That's before even touching how much essay based assessment is inherently an impediment to the dyslexic, regardless of accommodation. (On a related note, make your required readings PDFs that computers can read aloud people, it's a massive boon for accessibility.)
Well my school will certainly do poorly. Our largest major by a huge margin is elementary education. And the vast majority of them are teaching in k-6. But I guess that means we're a bad school?
As proposed, the assessement is designed from the outset to punish your school. Perhaps it is worth commenting on their site about the importance of elementary teachers for society, and that placing a lot of good teachers is a high outcome.
What are "outcomes"? If they look at salaries, a school training all professors in a country will have low median salary compared to one training plumbers. :P
That is what they are trying to decide, and are looking for recommendations from people in a variety of fields.