How Well Does Undergraduate Education Prepare College Students for the Employment Outlook? A Secondary Data Analysis of Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The trajectory of successfully completing an undergraduate educational program, attaining postgraduate employment, and beginning advanced degree programs was examined using the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B: 2008/2012), a large U.S. nationally representative longitudinal sample survey of college graduates who completed the requirements for a baccalaureate degree. The third cohort of this longitudinal study was used to compare participants’ status at the time of graduation and four years post-graduation. It was hypothesized that graduates whose post baccalaureate employment experiences related to their baccalaureate majors would be more likely to enroll in additional advanced degree studies, and that the post-baccalaureate field of study would be similar to the undergraduate major among those who pursued a graduate degree. Race, gender, disability, and immigration status were entered as control variables. Findings show that within two years, 42.1% of graduates had initiated postsecondary education. These data indicate that graduates were more likely to pursue degrees which were similar to their baccalaureate degree majors. If their bachelor degree majors were health professions, the likelihood that they pursued graduate-level health professional training and related sciences were highest (p<.001). By attending and finishing college, baccalaureate degree recipients heavily invest in their career by using their financial and non-financial resources. College students with fewer resources are less likely to successfully graduate, attain post-graduate employment in their field, and pursue post-baccalaureate studies. Instituting a competency-based curriculum in baccalaureate programs may improve opportunities for students to gain successful employment experiences, increase labor market outcomes, thus narrowing the divide between students with and without financial and non-financial resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".