How do the graduates of California’s public research universities contribute to California’s economy over the course of their careers, and how have their economic outcomes differed for alumni from different demographic groups and with different college majors? This topic brief visualizes a novel database linking the student transcript of every student to graduate from one such university – the University of California, Riverside – to wage and employment records over the four decades following their graduation. The resulting dashboards generate many new insights into the UCR educational experience and the economic successes achieved by its undergraduate alumni over the decades following graduation.
Longitudinal enrollment at UC Riverside
While history books are filled with the institutional trajectory and legacy of UC Riverside, less is known about the tens of thousands of undergraduate students who have graduated from Riverside over the past 40 years, particularly after they leave Riverside’s campus. The previous dashboard shows the number and demographics of UC Riverside undergraduates since the early 1980s, showing how the campus has grown and diversified over time. You can see these alternative demographic views by toggling the parameter in the upper-right-hand corner.
The purpose of these dashboards – part of a series that will eventually cover all ten UC campuses – is to provide a clearer picture of what happens to UC Riverside’s students after they leave campus. You’ll see that, by the end of their careers, more than one in three UCR Humanities majors are working in California’s K-12 schools, and that natural science majors who have taken several Humanities courses tend to have higher wages than those that chose not to. You’ll also see that Riverside may be unique among UC campuses in the persistent popularity of its humanities programs, which if anything have become slightly more popular over the past 40 years relative to other fields of study as they have declined in popularity across the country.
But the most obvious takeaway of these data is the broad economic success of UCR graduates, and their contributions to the state as a whole. By their early 30s, UCR graduates working in California have higher median earnings than the state median household income, and a quarter earn over $200,000 per year by their mid-career. Almost 20 percent begin their careers in finance and business services, and about 15 percent spend the middle of their careers working in public administration. More than 25 percent work at one point or another in California’s K-12 education system.
This series of dashboards uses newly-digitized and compiled data from the UC ClioMetric History Project to visualize Riverside alumni’s UC experiences and alumni outcomes in the state of California. Take a look at our methodology, and its associated disclaimers and caveats, on our Data and Methodology page. All of the presented visualizations are restricted to UC Riverside undergraduates who completed at least 10 courses at the campus.
The second dashboard below shows the distribution of students’ majors and courses while at Riverside since the 1980s. The humanities have persistently played an important role in the UCR education, and humanities departments teach about one in four courses taken by UCR students. Again bucking broader trends, UCR’s professional degrees have relatively declined in popularity over time, while natural science and engineering courses and majors have slowly grown in popularity. The ‘Advanced Toggle’ allows you to restrict the data to students who took courses in the specified number of academic departments.
Longitudinal course and major choices at UC Riverside
The third dashboard visualizes the distribution of Riverside graduates’ inflation-adjusted California wages from graduation through retirement. Riverside alumni exhibit gender and ethnicity gaps that mirrors that of the state and the nation – you can see this by toggling the `baseline’ and `comparison’ distributions to different genders or ethnicities – but wages are generally high and exhibit strong growth in the early years of students’ careers. The median Riverside graduate working in California was earning wages above the California household median by age 32, and 10 percent of graduates earn over $200,000 by their late 30s, providing spillover benefits across the state economy. In addition to the ‘Advanced Toggle’ described above, here you can also restrict the comparison student sample to those who took specified numbers of courses in specific disciplines (like the Humanities).
The data also show evidence of the value of UCR’s breadth of educational offerings. Some students leave Riverside having only taken classes in six or eight departments, and while they earn above-average wages for their first couple of years in the labor market, they are swiftly overcome in their early 30s, and have substantially below-average wages by the middle of their careers. Students who take fuller advantage of Riverside’s broad offerings have much stronger wage outcomes in their 40s and 50s, especially among students who earned degrees in the social or natural sciences.
Longitudinal UC Riverside alumni wage outcomes
Next: in what industries were UCR alumni earning their wages? The fourth dashboard shows the distribution of UCR alumni’s careers in California, again following alumni all the way through retirement. Graduates’ first jobs might be in Food, Accommodation, or Retail, but after a couple of years they’re much more likely to be working in Business Services, Health Care, and Higher Education, including about 1 percent who work for UCR itself. While students with majors in professionally-oriented fields are more likely to work in related industries, the relationship is far from perfect; students from every major end up employed in every segment of California’s economy.
Longitudinal industry of employment for UC Riverside alumni
Finally, how stable were the careers taken by UCR graduates? The last dashboard below visualizes the frequency with which UCR alumni switched between employers, industries, and geographic regions. At age 30, only 40 percent of UCR’s alumni had been working for their employer for five years, though that number rises to almost 80 percent at age 50. Indeed, a quarter of UCR alumni switch industries between ages 35 and 40, with science majors (and especially computer science majors) more likely to switch at every stage of their careers.
Longitudinal employment stability for UC Riverside alumni
In sum, these new visualizations present a new perspective into the educational experiences and lives of alumni of the University of California, Riverside. You can see similar dashboard series for other UC campuses from the UC longitudinal alumni dashboards landing page. In all, these data provide a more complete picture of the studies and California employment trajectories of the hundreds of thousands of alumni who have flowed through the state’s research university system.