How Many Connecticut College Alumni Earn Graduate Or Professional Degrees?

How Many Connecticut College Alumni Earn Graduate or Professional Degrees? John D. Nugent Office of Institutional Research and Planning March 2019 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY We used National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data to determine how many Connecticut College alumni earn graduate or professional degrees within about 10 years of graduating. NSC data showed 637 (47%) of the 1,367 graduates of the Classes of 2007, 2008, and 2009 earned a total of 711 graduate or professional degrees as of January 2019. In descending order of frequency, 67% of these were master’s degrees (n=477) 12% were law degrees (n=85), 9% were business degrees (n=62), 6% were doctorates (n=46), and another 6% were medical degrees (n=41). Because several dozen 2007‐2009 graduates were still enrolled in degree programs as of the Spring 2019 semester, and because NSC data include only U.S. colleges and universities, it is safe to conclude that about half of these alumni will ultimately have earned one or more post‐baccalaureate degrees. Most 2007‐2009 graduates who went on to receive a medical, law or business degree waited at least two years after their graduation from Conn before enrolling in the program. The average elapsed time before beginning a degree program in medicine, law, or business was 26 months, 27 months, and 48 months, respectively. Using the federal government’s Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) categories, the ten most common academic fields in which these alumni earned graduate or professional degrees were Health Professions and Related Programs (n=110 degrees); Education (n=104); Legal Professions and Studies (n=86); Business Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services (n=81); Public Administration and Social Service Professions (n=63); Psychology (n=52); Social Sciences (n=37); Visual and Performing Arts (n=26); Biological and Biomedical Sciences (n=20); Architecture and Related Services (n=15); and Physical Sciences (n=15). How Many Connecticut College Alumni Earn Graduate or Professional Degrees? John D. Nugent Office of Institutional Research and Planning April 2019 Overview We are increasingly asked for evidence regarding the activities of Connecticut College alumni, both in terms of employment and graduate and professional degree completions. While we routinely research our graduates’ activities in the first year following their graduation, we rarely take a comprehensive look at graduate school attendance and degree completions in a time frame broad enough to capture all or most of their total post‐baccalaureate degree activity. This report details the results of a “ten‐year‐out” study of the Class of 2008 to determine their post‐ Connecticut College enrollments and degree completions as of the end of the fall 2018 semester. To include a larger number of cases and increase our confidence in the results (in case, e.g., the class of 2008 was not typical for some reason), the Classes of 2007 and 2009 were also included, giving us nearly 1,400 cases to examine. It is thus technically a “nine‐to‐eleven‐year‐out study” of how many of our graduates earned graduate and professional degrees, what those degrees were, where they were completed, and what the undergraduate majors were of alumni who completed advanced degrees. Methodology To determine how many members of the Classes of 2007‐2009 pursued post‐Connecticut College education (either degrees or non‐degree‐seeking coursework), we queried the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a nonprofit enrollment and degree verification service to which most U.S. colleges and universities submit enrollment and degree‐completion data. As a participating institution, Connecticut College can access the database for institutional research purposes, and NSC data can usually indicate whether a student has enrolled at an institution after graduating from Connecticut College. If so, we receive semester‐by‐semester details on that enrollment—the name of the institution, starting and end dates of the term, whether the enrollment was part‐time or full‐time, and in many cases, the name of the program and whether a degree was received. Because our graduates’ post‐baccalaureate careers are always “in progress” as students successively enroll in programs, move through them, and complete them (or not), any summary of the post‐ baccalaureate enrollments of a group of graduates is necessarily a snapshot in time of a phenomenon that is really a motion picture. The results of the same query would look different six months or six years from now. Moreover, the NSC collects data only from U.S. institutions, so enrollments in graduate programs abroad are not captured in the results shown below. On the whole, though, NSC data provide much more thorough results than, say, an alumni survey – which usually have very low response rates. The names of the 1,367 graduates of the classes of 2007 (n=491), 2008 (n=440), and 2009 (n=436) were uploaded to the Clearinghouse in January 2019. This query looked for any enrollments at U.S. colleges and universities between each person’s graduation date and the end of the fall 2018 semester. 1 General results One or more NSC records were found for 810 (59%) of the 1,367 graduates covered in this study. This means that, as a general estimate, nearly 60% of graduates from these three class years enrolled at some U.S. institution at some point after graduating, for at least one course. (Most of our students who get any post‐ Connecticut College education enroll in degree programs, but some do take individual courses, sometimes at community colleges or online institutions. Non‐degree‐program coursework indicates our graduates’ ongoing intellectual curiosity and commitment to life‐long learning and also sometimes precedes enrollment in a degree program.) Each student’s “outcome” was coded using one or more of the following categories: No National Student Clearinghouse record was found for the student Student was enrolled at some point post‐Connecticut College, but no degree was earned Student was enrolled as of Fall 2018 (i.e., is a current student) Student earned a degree or credential o Student graduated but no information on degree type was in Clearinghouse records o Student earned a certificate (e.g., a sixth‐year certificate in educational leadership) o Student earned an associate’s degree (e.g., an associate’s in culinary arts) o Student earned a second bachelor’s degree (e.g., a BS in nursing) o Student earned a master’s degree (either terminal [MFA, MArch, etc.] or nonterminal [MA, MS, etc.]) o Student earned a professional (business or law) degree (MBA or JD/LLM) o Student earned a medical degree (MD, DO, DDM, DVM, etc.) o Student earned a doctorate (PhD, ThD, PsyD) A student could have more than one outcome, if, for example, she earned a master’s degree followed by a PhD, if he earned a master’s degree and was enrolled in the fall 2018 semester, or if she completed a dual‐ degree program and earned, say, an MBA and a JD (which were tallied for this study as two separate earned degrees). Because of these sorts of possibilities, the number of outcomes shown in the table below is larger than the number of students in the three graduating classes for whom an NSC record was found. The 917 recorded outcomes of the 810 students for whom the NSC contained information were as follows: OUTCOME # Earned a master's degree 477 Post‐Conn. enrollment but no evidence of degree earned 94 Earned a law degree 85 Enrolled as of Fall 2018 semester 66 Earned a business degree 62 Earned a doctorate 46 Earned a medical degree 41 Earned a certificate 20 Earned a second bachelor's degree 20 Earned an associate’s degree 4 Degree earned but no details found 2 TOTALS 917 2 To focus attention on just the graduate and professional degrees these alumni earned, we excluded outcomes of “enrolled as of fall 2018” and “Post‐Conn. enrollment but no evidence of degree earned,” plus the handful of students who earned associate’s degrees or second bachelor’s degrees (most of these students appear to be pursuing careers in nursing or medicine and need coursework they didn’t take as undergraduates). This results in the following totals, shown in descending order of frequency: OUTCOME # % Earned master's degree 477 67% Earned professional degree‐Law 85 12% Earned professional degree‐MBA 62 9% Earned doctorate 46 6% Earned medical degree 41 6% TOTALS 711 100% These 711 earned degrees reflect the accomplishments of 639 of the 1,367 graduates of the Classes of 2007‐ 2009. Based on those numbers, we find that an unduplicated count of 47% of these alumni went on to earn at least one graduate or professional degree within roughly 10 years of graduating from Connecticut College. As noted above, these figures should be considered undercounts because they do not capture degrees earned from institutions outside the U.S., and because about 50 students without any earned post‐ Connecticut College degree so far were enrolled as of the fall 2018 semester – presumably on their way to earning a degree in most cases. As such, it is reasonable to conclude that about half of our students earn a graduate or professional degree within the decade following their graduation. Full details of the degrees earned by these students are found in the appendix to this report. The summary table below shows the institutions at which our graduates most frequently earned the indicated degrees. DOCTORATES (PhD, PsyD, ThD; n=46) BAYLOR UNIVERSITY 2 BOSTON UNIVERSITY 2 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 2 YALE UNIVERSITY 2 YESHIVA UNIVERSITY 2 +36

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