Post-Graduation Survey and Report

ANNUAL REPORT:

Options to view for university, by college and by major, and to view prior years' reports.
Latest report: 08-09 grads.

2008-2009 Executive Summary (MS Word docx).

SIX-YEAR SUMMARIES:

PDF format. Total university data.
Includes results from academic years: 08-09 through 03-04

• Highlights, six years
• Salary medians by college, six years
• Job source by college, six years
• What grads wished they'd done differently, six years
• Employers most-reported by employed grads, six years
• Institutions most-reported by grads continuing education, six years

Questions?

• See frequently asked questions.

Future reports?

The 2009-2010 cohort survey will be completed in November 2010. We carefully proofread and compile results. If all goes according to plan, we expect to publish that report to before Feb. 2011.

• Some of our wonderful grads comment that other students can contact them for advice.
• We appreciate your offer! However, as promised, we don't share any individual info from the Post-Grad Survey — keeping our promise of confidentiality.

• To share your contact info to give advice to other VT grads and students, become a VT CareerLink volunteer.
• Only people with VT PID & password can access your contact info.
• Want advice? Search the VT CareerLink volunteers.

• We would like to collect post-graduation salary data for graduate students, particularly master's degree graduates, who are employed at completion of the graduate degree; and we would like to report that by major.
• However, we only report salary medians for majors with at least four responses.

• If you view Degrees Conferred by Academic Degree Level, Major from the Office of Institutional Research, you see the number of master's degrees conferred for each major, by college, each academic year. For 07-08, in over 50 master's majors (75%) fewer than 20 degrees were conferred, and in only 17 master's majors were more than 20 degrees conferred. In three colleges, all of the master's degree majors have fewer than 20 degrees conferred per year.
• Factor in the counts: total number of grads, respondents, employed respondents, employed respondents who provide salary: For undergrads that has come to 1/3 of the total.
  • We get 70% response rate, if we're lucky. Well, it's not luck; to get a 70% response rate for undergraduates, we have to make approximately 14 requests to non-respondents over a several-month period. So it's work, not luck.
  • For total university, fewer than 60% of respondents report employment.
  • For total university, approximately 80% of employed respondents provide salary data.
  • Thus for graduate majors with fewer than 15 graduates per year, it's likely we would not receive sufficient responses to report a median.
• So it's not that this is not doable; it's an equation, and it's a very large undertaking that could yield a low return for investment. A report showing a lot of asterisks — perhaps for up to 75% of the graduate majors, and in some cases for whole colleges — for "insufficient responses" wouldn't be very satisfying to us or to you.
• In the meantime, master's students wondering about salary information are advised to consult your department faculty who work with graduate students, including the graduate program coordinator in your department, and you can consult salary research sources.