University of Colorado at Boulder Parent Guide
How Valuable is a CU Degree?
The University of Colorado at Boulder is nationally recognized for its unique and stellar academic programs, outstanding faculty, high achieving students, award-winning staff, and beautiful geographic setting. In my role as director of Career Services, I am often asked how this academic excellence translates into the world of work in terms of degree marketability. While the new college job market is related to the national job market, it has some differences that make it bounce back faster and weather difficulties more easily than the market in general.
For example, employers who are moving from a stalled hiring period into a more active hiring period may target new graduates as a cost-effective strategy and a way of finding enthusiastic professionals with the latest skills and training. When our employer relations staff talks with potential employers about the value of hiring new college graduates in general and CU-Boulder graduates in particular, they focus specifically on the benefits of hiring the best and the brightest this country has to offer.
Marketing the value of a degree from CU-Boulder is not difficult. In fact, we enjoy talking about the academic and leadership credentials of our students, the caliber of our nationally celebrated faculty, the uniqueness of our academic offerings, and the variety of extracurricular education available to our students. The list of awards and achievements is long and dramatic, so I encourage everyone affiliated with CU to check it out. Although our awards and rankings are impressive, the strength of our employer relations depends primarily upon our graduates.
What keeps employers returning to CU-Boulder to recruit year after year is the success of previous recruits within their organization. CU graduates make good employees. As long as hiring managers and campus recruiters come to understand that investing in a CU graduate is a good decision for their company, they will continue to look to CU for their recruiting needs. Overall, our graduates continue to interview and are finding success within a tricky job market.
Although there are many ways to measure “value,” salary potential is likely to be at the top of many lists. To get a better sense of the value of a CU degree, it is helpful to look at how successful our graduates have been in the marketplace. For that information, we turn to Pay Scale, a market leader in global online compensation data. Specifically, we look at data for bachelor’s graduates without higher degrees who are full-time employees in the United States (check out www.PayScale.com for more info).
Here are some highlights from their recent rankings:
- CU-Boulder ranks seventh among state universities for salary potential
- CU-Boulder ranks second among western colleges (public and private) for salary potential
Obviously, the labor market around the world has been impacted by economic turmoil and CU has been no exception. Although our fall 2008 Career & Internship Fair was a sell-out for employers (with 30 companies on our waiting list), the spring 2009 fair was slower. Overall, however, our graduates continue to interview and are finding success within a tricky job market. To help our graduates maximize their potential and stand out among candidates, we offer professional career coaching. Coaches and counselors can help students identify strengths, make career decisions, strategize a plan, write a resume, practice interviewing, and build a network. We also work closely with the Alumni Association to help students connect with alumni as well as to help alumni in career transition. The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to helping graduates be successful professionally throughout their lifetime.
By Lisa Severy, director, Career Services
