New Dashboard Shows Employment and Earnings of UW and Community College Grads

It’s now possible for prospective and current students, as well as members of the public, to learn what recent graduates of the University of Wyoming are doing in the state -- and how much money they are making.

Wyoming’s collaborative Statewide Longitudinal Education Data System (SLEDS) initiative has released the first Post Secondary Education Workforce Outcomes in Wyoming Dashboard. It displays the Wyoming employment rate and annual salary information for graduates of Wyoming’s community colleges and UW.

The annual salary and employment rates are calculated by matching student credential records with Wyoming unemployment insurance wage records, which represent full-time employees in the Wyoming workforce.

The dashboard is available online at www.wy-sleds.org/workforce-outcomes. UW’s Office of Institutional Analysis played a key role in its development.

The dashboard was built through a collaboration involving UW, Wyoming’s community colleges, the Wyoming Community College Commission and the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services. It is designed to assess employment outcomes of community college graduates and UW graduates and answer the question: What do graduates do after graduation?

“At a time when there are questions about the value of higher education, this dashboard provides real data about our graduates’ employment and earning outcomes,” says Assistant Professor Mark Perkins, the assistant dean of UW’s College of Education who serves on the SLEDS executive board. “We know that national studies demonstrate the economic value of a college degree over the arc of a career, and we know that more than half of our UW graduates earn their degrees without incurring debt. This dashboard provides additional, degree-specific data points for educational and career planning.”

Wyoming SLEDS collects and links data to assess education and workforce efforts. It uses the anonymized data of Wyoming’s participating entities in a secure environment to create educational and workforce reports, research requests, dashboards and other statistical analysis. These outputs will allow Wyoming’s policymakers, practitioners and the public to make more informed decisions.

Those with questions about the dashboard, or seeking a demonstration of its use, may call UW’s Office of Institutional Analysis at (307) 766-2898 or email oia@uwyo.edu.