For students and families trying to answer one of the most consequential financial questions they will face — whether college or graduate school is worth the cost — the federal government just made a powerful trove of earnings data considerably larger.
The Census Bureau on Thursday expanded its Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes, or PSEO, experimental dataset to 1,117 colleges and universities, covering about 40% of all U.S. college graduates.
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The interactive tool allows prospective students to see what graduates earned with particular degrees from participating schools one year, five years and 10 years after graduation. Users can also compare broader state-level results.
For example, graduates with bachelor’s degrees in engineering from participating Texas institutions earned a median of $78,990 annually one year after graduation and $135,600 after 10 years.
In New Jersey, people with bachelor’s degrees from participating schools had median annual earnings of $50,040 one year after graduation and $86,721 after a decade. These figures are in 2023 dollars.
The data also shows where graduates moved and which industries employed them.
“People are questioning the value of higher education,” said Gina Johnson, director of the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes Coalition, which works with the Census Bureau and participating schools to expand and use PSEO. “And rightly so. They want their investment to pay off.”
Johnson said the census tool can help students judge which majors pay off, how long it may take to earn enough to pay off loans they needed to obtain the degree and when their salaries might support the lifestyles they want.
She said that state agencies, policymakers and schools also use these statistics.
While the federal database does not cover every state and school in the country because participation remains voluntary, this week’s update added 165 institutions through new and expanded partnerships in Colorado, Maryland, New Mexico, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Tennessee and Vermont.
Johnson called the expansion “a really big splash.”
“Now we can say that this is a good representation of the schools in the nation,” she told Straight Arrow.
But a new government directive puts this dataset and others at risk. Officials may even choose to withhold data “as a last resort.”
Database only the federal government can build
PSEO is the kind of nationwide database that only the federal government has the reach and resources to realistically build.
It connects two enormous sets of records: participating colleges and states provide information on who graduated, where they studied and which degrees they earned, and the Census Bureau links those records with its data on jobs and wages.
Privately collected rankings or survey data typically rely on people opting in and self-reporting their education and salaries.
This, however, is “actual, real data,” Johnson said, obtained directly from schools, state agencies and businesses that are legally required to provide wage records.
The Census Bureau publishes aggregated statistics so that individuals cannot be identified. The underlying records are “meticulously” protected, Johnson said.
“It’s very trustworthy.”
Data at risk
This week’s data release raises another question: How long will this information remain available?
On June 4, the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, issued a controversial new policy that restricts the privacy-protection methods its statistical agencies can use for published reports.
The order, called “Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products,” bars the agencies from using a technique known as “noise infusion,” in which small amounts of data are added or taken away from datasets to make it harder to identify individuals while preserving broader statistical patterns.
Instead, the order makes “coarsening” the preferred privacy-protection method. That involves publishing data with less detail; for example, ages may be reported in ranges, or numbers may be rounded.
The order allows the Commerce Department to suppress or withhold certain data from publication “as a last resort.”
In an Aug. 17 blog post, Commerce said the order “marks a positive shift in how the Census Bureau balances confidentiality, accuracy and data availability.”
But a coalition of statistical and research organizations said the order “subverts processes developed over decades” and “creates a scenario in which there will either be less privacy for our personal information, or less usable data, or both.”
Johnson said the Commerce Department’s order caused a two-month delay in this week’s data release.
“For a while, we thought that we weren’t going to get these data at all,” she said.
For now, the Census Bureau says that certain statistical products that use noise infusion because it is required under existing state data-sharing agreements can continue until those agreements are updated. Johnson said those agreements allowed the latest PSEO release to proceed.
But it is unclear what happens after those agreements are updated.
Census Bureau spokesperson Kristina Barrett referred Straight Arrow’s questions about the PSEO findings to Johnson and did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about the database’s future.
The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to Straight Arrow’s request for comment.
“These data are critically important to understanding the value of post-secondary education,” Johnson said.
“We’re concerned about whether these data will continue to be available to the public.”
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