How many students land a job after they graduate college? What do they earn? And do students who select certain majors do better?
State officials don’t know because the state doesn’t track where students end up after they leave college.
That could soon change.
The legislature’s Higher Education and Program Review and Investigations committees have approved a bill that would require the state’s public colleges and the departments of Labor and Education to implement a new system to track these outcomes.
It should be an easy task, says Fred Carstensen, director of The University of Connecticut’s Center for Economic Analysis (CCEA).
The CCEA developed the data portal necessary so the state could regularly track this information and put into place the security necessary to ensure that individual student information is not made public.
But state officials discontinued that portal in 2008. Carstensen said it should take minimal work to get it up and running.
“There is nothing new to create. The data design is all there,” he said.
Development of the “P20 WIN” data system that the bill would implement has been underway for a few years and is funded by a federal State Longitudinal System Grant. The bill would require UConn to participate. The independent colleges are also building their own system.