This project was made possible by data from the Wall Street Journal, Where it Pays to Attend College; Salaries by College and College Degree Program and Payscale, Inc.
My google sheets spreadsheet can be found here. Before I started, I froze and bolded the header row for each of the sheets. On the salaries by College Type spreadsheet, I added a column for TYPE of school.
Students pursuing a degree in nursing are often looking for a stable career path with good pay. The tradeoff that nursing students accept is the hard work they put in as an undergraduates. Nursing majors have to keep high GPAs, take intense classes, and are often applying to programs that are heavily impacted (too many students are applying at once). While nursing major’s median starting salary is in the top ten of majors analysed by the Wall Street Journal at $54,200, their growing potential is limited. Nursing majors have a percent change from starting salaries to mid career salaries of only 23.6 percent, the second lowest of all majors analysed. Why are nursing majors not paid well for the high stress student enviornment?
National Nurses United, Press contact. Email press@calnurses.org Rachel Berger – (510) 433-2780
The national contact for the NNU, a labor Union, Rachel Berger, will help put into context what the current market for working nurses is like. This kind of broad overview will help me understand whether or not gains have been made recently for nurses.
Sharon Warner Associate Director and interim MSN (Entry into Nursing) Recruitment, Johns Hopkins University 410-502-7215 | swarner7@jhu.edu
According to U.S. News and World Report, Johns Hopkins has the #1 nursing program in the U.S. Sharon Warner will help me understand if all Nursing students end up getting registered, and what Nursing students usually do after they graduate.
Robert Rosseter rrosseter@aacnnursing.org (202) 463-6930, ext. 231
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) put out a report in 2019 that studied the inadequate number of open seats for otherwise qualified nursing students, and Robert Rosseter is the listed contact. I can ask him why he thinks nursing students aren’t being paid that much if there’s a high demand and shortage of nurses.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nursing
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2020 29-1141 Registered Nurses. I can compare what the median wage for working nurses is for nursing majors. For example, it says “The median annual wage for registered nurses was $75,330 in May 2020.”, which is different than what the median annual wage is for nursing majors.
- The American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2019 report
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) published this report in 2019. In the report it said it “found nursing schools could not accept over 75,000 qualified applicants for baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2018 due to inadequate faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors and budgets”.
1. Liberal arts colleges are, on average, more expensive to attend than public universities. Do you make more if you attend a liberal arts school?
To answer this question....
- I made a pivot table on Google Sheets.
- I set my 'Row' as type of college
- I made my 'Values' Starting Median Salary, Mid-Career Median Salary, and Mid-Career 90th Percentile Salary. I chose these three values to show the median salary of a a recent college graduate, a well established professional in their field, and the highest earners from the college. The starting salary did not tell me much, other than an increased earning potential for recent Ivy league graduates and engineering school graduates.
- I summarized the data by average and sorted by type.
The mid-career median salary for the Liberal arts and Party type of schools are not significantly different, with Liberal Arts school attendees salaries about 5 thousand dollars more per year. If a student incurs significant debt from the more expensive Liberal Arts colleges, it may not be financially wise to attend one over a state/party school. However, the 90th percentile earners from Liberal Arts colleges do make $191,142.86, compared to $166,947.3 for party schools and $173,333.33 for engineering schools. Mid career, high earners from liberal arts colleges therefore earn slightly more on average than those from the two types of schools.
2. Do you earn more from attending a state schools or a party schools?
To answer this question, I used the same pivot table as before, but instead looked at the state and party schools.
Party school attendees actually made more each year than those who attended state schools. In average mid career median salary, starting median salary, and mid career 90th percentile earners, party school attendees make slightly more on average. Starting median salaries are not significantly different, but are higher by over a thousand dollars.
3. Do you make more money if you graduate from certain U.S. regions?
To answer this question...
- I made a pivot table.
- I set row as region of the U.S
- I set my value as mid-career median salary, sorted by average. I chose this value because I believe that it encompasses a data point that covers the most general statement about graduates.
Both California and the Northeastern regions make $93,132.14 and $91,352.00, respectively. This, compared to sub-80k salaries in the other regions, shows that graduates that attend colleges in these two areas gross higher salaries, on average.
4. What stem careers see earning potential stagnate?
To answer this question...
- I sorted the percent change from Starting to Mid-Career Salary column from lowest to highest
- I found which majors are considered STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) with this website
- I manually set the STEM majors within the bottom ten by percent change in salary to italics.
- I then sorted the list by starting median to learn more
The three majors with the lowest change in salary over a carreer were STEM majors. Physician Assistant, Nursing, and Nutrition majors see a 23.4, 23.6, and 38.6 change respectively. Physician Assistant starting median salary is relatively high at $74,300.00, the highest starting salary out of all majors on the data sheet. The mid career median reaches $91,700.00.
Nursing, on the other hand, is number 9 out of the starting salary list at $54,200.00, but only reaches $67,000.00 at mid career median. For reference, philosophy majors reach a mid career median of $81,200.00.
5. Are there any liberal arts majors in the top 10 median earners?
To answer this question...
- I selected the other columns I wanted to hide
- I sorted Mid career salary by highest to lowest
- Here, I looked up to try and find what qualifies as liberal arts. I was not able to find a real list of what is considered liberal arts.
No there are not. There is, however, a non-STEM major in the top 10 median earners, economics. Economics was the only one not defined as STEM on this website, but it seems like the category is a little squishy. For example, the University of Pennsylvania considers it STEM.
If we look in a completely different category for fun, like the Mid-Career 90th Percentile Salary, Political Science is at #10, making the top 10 cutoff! To find this, I sorted Mid Career 90th Percentile Salary from High to low, and hid all other columns.
