Life success: Does it matter where you go to college?

Apparently not, according to a first-of-its-kind nationwide survey, conducted by Gallup and Purdue University. After interviewing more than 30,000 U.S. adults nationwide, the authors came to this surprising conclusion: to succeed in life, it doesn’t matter where you go to college – what matters is what you do there, what experiences you have and how engaged you are.

The promise is clear: if we pursue a college education, it will lead to a better life. And the natural extension is that the more prestigious the school, the more successful we’ll be.  But the Gallup-Purdue survey finds that the school itself doesn’t matter.  And they have the numbers to back it up. 

Said the authors:   

“. . . [W]here graduates went to college – public or private, small or large, very selective or not selective – hardly matters at all to their current well-being and their work life in comparison to their experience in college.” 

Gallup-Purdue evaluated a person’s life in two broad categories: workplace engagement and personal well-being.  Some key findings:

·         Living the great life (well-being).  The survey found that only 11% of graduates are thriving in all five areas of well-being (sense of purpose, financial security, personal health, close relationships and community involvement), leading the authors to conclude that “many graduates are still waiting to experience that ‘great life’.”  And, apparently, it doesn’t matter what college you attended. For the top 100 schools listed by U.S. News & World Report, just 12% of their graduates are thriving in all five elements, just a single percent higher than the overall average. 

·         Workplace engagement – While college graduates are enjoying their work more than non-graduates, the survey found that only 39% of college graduates are engaged at work (49% are “not engaged” and 12% are “actively disengaged”). Statistically, graduates who majored in the arts and humanities (41%) and the social sciences (41%) were slightly more engaged at work than either science (38%) or business majors (37%). And “[t]here were no differences in employee engagement by race or ethnicity, or by whether the graduates had been the first in the family to attend college.”

Great Jobs, Great Lives – do universities help us achieve them?

The study authors maintain that, despite universal agreement that college is designed to help adults thrive in the workplace, and in their lives, “. . . there is not a single college or university in the U.S. that has rigorously researched and measured whether their graduates have ‘great jobs’ and ‘great lives’.”

Accordingly, the authors urge us to focus on the college experience, given that these six "experiences" are directly linked to workplace engagement and well-being later in life:

1.       Mentor – having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their dreams;

2.       Support – knowing that a professor cared about them;

3.       Excitement – having at least one professor who made them feel excited about learning;

4.       Internship – having an internship or job that was connected to their classroom learning;

5.       Long-term project – working on a project that took a semester or more to complete; and

6.       Extracurricular activities – being active in pursuing extracurricular activities.

Said the authors: “Feeling supported and having deep learning experiences means everything when it comes to long-term outcomes for college graduates.”

A final word from Gallup-Purdue:

“A national dialogue on improving the college experience should focus on ways to provide students with more emotional support, and with more opportunities for deep learning experiences and real-life applications of classroom learning.”

 

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