When young adults graduate college and head off into the “real world,” they often feel both excited and nervous.
The uneasiness stems from leaving the comfort and fun of a college campus where a student just spent four or more transformative years while the excitement stems from the anticipation of a landing a lucrative job that opens up possibilities far removed from the days of dieting on ramen and Red Bull.
However, LendEDU’s most recent study found that college students are overestimating how much they are going to make right out of college compared to what most will likely bring home.
Using data licensed from College Pulse, LendEDU analyzed over 7,000 responses, categorized by school, from current college students to uncover what they anticipate they will make immediately upon graduating.
These numbers were then compared to statistics from PayScale that report the average salary for a college graduate with zero to five years of experience at nearly 1,000 different colleges and universities.
The final results revealed that college students could be in for disappointment when they begin fielding full-time job offers post graduation.
Graduating student Katherine Thomas has “I Did It” written on her mortar board during Commencement Exercises at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts May 19, 2014. REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES – Tags: EDUCATION SOCIETY)
Specifically, the median expected salary after graduating was $60,000, but the PayScale data showed that the typical graduate with zero to five years experience makes $48,400.
College students should expect to receive a comfortable salary after graduation; ambition is a good thing. However, it is important to keep the expectations in check to allow for realistic budgeting and financial planning.
Moreover, the PayScale data takes into account graduates that have up to five years of full-time work experience, which should bring up the average salary a considerable amount. The College Pulse numbers only reflect what students expect to make with no experience at a full-time job.
Taking this difference into account, it is likely that college students are more aggressively overestimating their expected income than what our analysis actually shows.
School-by-School Data
As noted earlier, the College Pulse data allowed for LendEDU to look at what college students at 62 different colleges and universities throughout the U.S. expect to make right after graduating.
These figures were stacked up against the PayScale data, which reports the average salary at each of those 62 schools for graduates with zero to five years experience.
Report by Michael Brown. Copy of the report can be found online