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, Santa Cruz – to wage and employment records over the four decades following their graduation. The resulting dashboards generate many new insights into the UCSC educational experience and the economic successes achieved by its undergraduate alumni over the decades following graduation.
Longitudinal enrollment at UC Santa Cruz
While much is known about the institutional history of UC Santa Cruz — e.g. its foundation as the liberal arts college of the University of California system and its innovative pedagogical practices, including strong residential colleges and (until recently) narrative evaluations replacing letter grades — until now, less was known about the tens of thousands of undergraduate students who have graduated from Santa Cruz over the past 60 years, particularly after they leave Santa Cruz’s campus. The previous dashboard shows the number and demographics of UC Santa Cruz undergraduates since the university was founded in the 1960s, 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 Santa Cruz’s students after they leave campus. You’ll see that, by the end of their careers, about one in five UCSC natural science majors are working in the Health Care industry, and that natural science majors who have taken a few Humanities courses tend to have higher wages than those that chose not to. You’ll also see the slow decline in the prevalence of Humanities at UCSC, from 34% of course enrollments and 30% of majors in the late 1960s to 19% of enrollments and 12% of majors in the 2015 cohort, while the natural sciences have grown over time.
But the most obvious takeaway of these data is the broad economic success of UCSC graduates, and their contributions to the state as a whole. By their mid-30s, UCSC graduates working in California have higher median earnings than the state median household income, and about half earn more than $100,000 per year by their mid-career. Around 5 percent work in California’s tech industry, and by the end of their career more than 10 percent work for universities and other higher education institutions. More than 20 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 Santa Cruz 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 Santa Cruz undergraduates who completed at least 10 courses at the campus.
The second dashboard below shows the distribution of students’ majors and courses while at Santa Cruz since the 1960s. The humanities have always played an important role in the UCSC education, but that role has been persistently shrinking. While Engineering was not available at the school until the mid-1990s, its position has slowly grown, with science and engineering courses approaching half of all course enrollments for the mid-2010s cohorts. 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 Santa Cruz
The third dashboard visualizes the distribution of Santa Cruz graduates’ inflation-adjusted California wages from graduation through retirement. Santa Cruz 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 Santa Cruz graduate working in California was earning wages above the California household median by age 31, and more than 10 percent of graduates earn over $200,000 by age 40, 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 the value of UCSC’s broad liberal arts curriculum. Changing the `Advanced Toggles’ shows that students who took courses in 11-14 departments tended to have higher lifetime earnings than those who only took courses in 5-10 departments. Interestingly, not only did humanities majors who took 3-5 science courses tend to earn higher wages than those who took fewer science courses, but science majors who took 3-5 humanities courses also tended to earn higher wages than those who took fewer humanities courses.
Longitudinal UC Santa Cruz alumni wage outcomes
Next: in what industries were UCSC alumni earning their wages? The fourth dashboard shows the distribution of UCSC 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 around 2 percent who work for UCSC 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 Santa Cruz alumni
Finally, how stable were the careers taken by UCSC graduates? The last dashboard below visualizes the frequency with which UCSC alumni switched between employers, industries, and geographic regions. At age 30, only 40 percent of UCSC’s alumni had been working for their employer for five years, though that number rises to 80 percent at age 55. Indeed, 30 percent of UCSC 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 Santa Cruz alumni
In sum, these new visualizations present a new perspective into the educational experiences and lives of alumni of the University of California, Santa Cruz. 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.