(via Out of Harvard, and Into Finance - NYTimes.com)
“Since I’m a proud Tiger, let’s start with Princeton, which sent me data going back to 2000. The share entering finance jobs is in yellow, and I’ve included exact percentages for some of the more popular industries…”
Catherine Rampell graduated in 2007 with a degree in anthropology.
A point about this data, though:
If I remember correctly, this Career Services survey is conducted some time in mid-May. At that point, I would imagine that an unusual proportion of students with jobs lined up are employed in banking or consulting… because those are the sectors that begin recruiting—and hiring—in September. If you were working in journalism, on the other hand, it’s likely that you wouldn’t have a full-time job lined up until much later on.
Yale’s data, which looks at students a year out of college, is a much better indicator of which industries students are choosing.
Great point; nonprofit jobs, especially, tend to materialize either after graduation or late in the summer. Still, Princeton’s exit surveys have a high response rate (I think something above 90%?) because everyone fills them out at the senior checkout fair. So if there were lots of students without anything lined up, wouldn’t the “other/unspecified” category be larger?
Probably not, because this is a survey of the students who do have full-time jobs. I think “other/unspecified” means you answered something like “I have a full-time job lined up,” for the first question, but then didn’t specify a category—not that you don’t have a job lined up. I think those are two separate questions on the survey, anyway.
So basically, if you checked “I don’t have a full-time job lined up,” you would not be in this chart at all. Incidentally, the students who checked “I don’t have a full-time job lined up” are most likely not in consulting or banking, because those industries filled up their rosters back in the fall. Adding them in—say, a year later—would paint a different picture.
