Big Ten Alumni Annual Income
University of Maryland alumni make an average annual salary of $59,100, out-earning graduates from all Big Ten schools except Northwestern University, according to recently released federal data.
“I’m going to be rubbing that in the faces of all the directors of career centers at other Big Ten institutions,” said Kelley Bishop, director of the University Career Center and The President’s Promise.
The information, published last weekend, is part of President Obama’s newly launched College Scorecard website. The site presents institutions’ graduation rates, average cost and financial aid statistics. Alumni salary data are drawn from students who received financial aid and calculated 10 years after matriculation.
As it is now, Bishop said, the site doesn’t assign rankings or statuses to schools, but simply presents students and families with information on factors they might be looking for in a school, be it high graduation rates or low student debt.
Alumni of this university had the second-lowest amount of federal student debt compared to other Big Ten graduates, again only falling behind Northwestern. They found themselves saddled with an average of $19,500 in debt, compared to $25,714 at Michigan State University and $27,000 at Penn State.
Financial Aid Director Monique Boyd said she was proud of how this university compared.
“We do a lot of work keeping students abreast of the best options for how to finance their education,” Boyd said.
The university’s high average graduate salary also contrasts sharply with other schools in the conference, such as Ohio State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, whose graduates on average make $42,600 and $43,800, respectively. The national average is $34,343.
Bishop attributes this to a variety of factors, including this university’s “brand recognition,” the high number of students who complete internships and its location. Out of 2014’s spring graduating class, 49 percent stayed in Maryland, where the average income is $53,470, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Twelve percent went to work in Virginia, where it is $50,750.
“Some of this is a factor of where students choose to go to work,” he said. “You’re going to see higher salaries in major city centers. You don’t see salaries at that level, necessarily, in the Midwest.”
The website replaces Obama’s previous plan, which he announced in 2013, to create a government system that ranks the quality of all higher education institutions in the nation.
“Americans will now have access to reliable data on every institution of higher education,” Obama said in a statement Saturday. “You’ll be able to see how much each school’s graduates earn, how much debt they graduate with, and what percentage of a school’s students can pay back their loans — which will help all of us see which schools do the best job of preparing America for success.”
His original announcement faced backlash from college presidents and education lobbying groups nationwide who said it was outside the scope of the government to rank colleges and that the system would punish low-performing schools.
University President Wallace Loh said in 2013 that he supported Obama’s previous plan, which could have served as an alternative to the popular U.S. News & World Report rankings.
“All of these ranking systems or plans have flaws,” Loh said. “What is distinctive, and what I do applaud about the Obama effort, is that compared to most others, it focuses on outcomes — the results, graduation rates, income.”
Some groups, such as the American Council on Education, have criticized the new College Scorecard for only providing one salary number for an institution, instead of breaking it down by what a student studied, such as engineering versus philosophy.
But this university’s high average graduate income, despite that lack of differentiation among fields, is impressive, Bishop said.
“We’re a very broad-based university and we have students going into every kind of field from teaching to social work, all kind of professional fields,” he said. “That number is really high considering the breadth of fields our students go into.”
Senior staff writer Ellie Silverman contributed to this report.
