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"Check and analyse what skills are in demand in the labour market- compare your country and get information on your next career move

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Log In To Your Career Exploration Account | Virtualjobshadow.com

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Explore the leading online career exploration and career planning resource to discover, develop and chart career paths based on choice-not chance. Login Now

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1. What problems that exist in the world do you want to solve?

2. What education do you need in order to engage the problems you identified above?

3. What are your best options for getting the education that you identified above?

4. Given your choice of education, what factors determine how much you will earn?

5. Are there ways to improve your level of expected income?

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Payscale - Salary Comparison, Salary Survey, Search Wages

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Payscale - Salary Comparison, Salary Survey, Search Wages

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Navigate market uncertainty with validated, always-on compensation data from multiple sources delivered transparently through our trusted data platform

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The Occupational Outlook Handbook is the government's premier source of career guidance featuring hundreds of occupations-such as carpenters, teachers, and veterinarians. Revised annually, the latest version contains employment projections for the 2022-32 decade.

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These sites don't include more traditional sites, because I realize you already have access to them. The sites included here may give you an alternative, more "economic" perspective on choosing a college.

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A new study, based on millions of anonymous tax records, shows that some colleges are even more economically segregated than previously understood, while others are associated with income mobility.

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College Results Online (CRO) is an interactive, user-friendly Web tool designed to provide policymakers, counselors, parents, students, and others with information about college graduation rates for nearly any four-year college or university in the country.

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Use Payscale’s College ROI Report to determine which colleges offer the best value. Learn which schools offer the highest return on investment for tuition.

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This site has great info; sorry for the graphic.

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Since 2005, the Washington Monthly has released an annual College Guide and rankings, where we rate schools based on what they are doing for the country. It's our answer to U.S News & World Report, which relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige to evaluate schools.

We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). We also offer our "Best Bang for the Buck" rankings - our exclusive list of schools that help non-wealthy students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices. For the second year in a row, we rank the best colleges for adult learners, the first-ever ranking of its kind. More rankings information, including methodologies, can be found here.

Click the cover to read our 2017 College Guide issue online. You can also read last year's issue. And be sure to check out our book, The Other College Guide.

We are deeply grateful to the Lumina Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support.

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Since 2005, the Washington Monthly has released an annual College Guide and rankings, where we rate schools based on what they are doing for the country. It's our answer to U.S News & World Report, which relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige to evaluate schools.

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The Education Equality Index is the first comparative national tool exploring how quickly states, cities and schools are closing the achievement gap.

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Prepare for & apply to college with the Coalition for College

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Free college-planning tools, provided by 150+ top schools, to help students learn about, prepare for and apply to college. Start early, stress less

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AMERICAN universities claim to hate the simplistic, reductive college rankings published by magazines like US News, which wield ever-growing influence over where students attend. Many have even called for an information boycott against the authors of such ratings. Among the well-founded criticisms of these popular league tables is that they do not measure how much universities help their students, but rather what type of students choose to attend each college. A well-known economics paper by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that people who attended elite colleges do not make more money than do workers who were accepted to the same institutions but chose less selective ones instead-suggesting that former attendees and graduates of Harvard tend to be rich because they were already intelligent and hard-working before they entered college, not because of the education or opportunities the university provided.

On September 12th America's Department of Education unveiled a "college scorecard" website containing a cornucopia of data about universities. The government generated the numbers by matching individuals' student-loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to compare pupils' qualifications and demographic characteristics when they entered college with their salaries ten years later. That information offers the potential to disentangle student merit from university contributions, and thus to determine which colleges deliver the greatest return and why.

The Economist's first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its students subsequently earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere. Thanks to the scorecard, the first number is easily accessible. The second, however, can only be estimated. To calculate this figure, we ran the scorecard's earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a common method of measuring the relationships between variables.

We wanted to know how a wide range of factors would affect the median earnings in 2011 of a college's former students. Most of the data were available directly from the scorecard: for the entering class of 2001, we used average SAT scores, sex ratio, race breakdown, college size, whether a university was public or private, and the mix of subjects students chose to study. There were 1,275 four-year, non-vocational colleges in the scorecard database with available figures in all of these categories. We complemented these inputs with information from other sources: whether a college is affiliated with the Catholic Church or a Protestant Christian denomination; the wealth of its state (using a weighted average of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia for Washington) and prevailing wages in its city (with a flat value for colleges in rural areas); whether it has a ranked undergraduate business school (and is thus likely to attract business-minded students); the percentage of its students who receive federal Pell grants given to working-class students (a measure of family income); and whether it is a liberal-arts college. Finally, to avoid penalising universities that tend to attract students who are disinclined to pursue lucrative careers, we created a " Marx and Marley index", based on colleges' appearances during the past 15 years on the Princeton Review's top-20 lists for political leftism and " reefer madness ". (For technically minded readers, all of these variables were statistically significant at the 1% level, and the overall r-squared was .8538, meaning that 85% of the variation in graduate salaries between colleges was explained by these factors. We also tested the model using 2009 earnings figures rather than 2011, and for the entering class of 2003 rather than 2001, and got virtually identical results.)

After feeding this information into the regression, our statistical software produced an estimate for each college based exclusively on these factors of how much money its former students would make. Its upper tiers are dominated by colleges that emphasise engineering (such as Worcester Polytechnic) and attract students with high SAT scores (like Stanford). The lower extreme is populated by religious and art-focused colleges, particularly those in the south and Midwest. This number represents the benchmark against which we subsequently compare each college's earnings figure to produce the rankings. The bar is set extremely high for universities like Caltech, which are selective, close to prosperous cities and teach mainly lucrative subjects. If their students didn't go on to extremely high-paying careers, the college would probably be doing something gravely wrong. Conversely, a southern art school with low-scoring, working-class students, such as the Memphis College of Art, might actually be giving its pupils a modest economic boost even though they earn a paltry $26,700 a year a decade after enrolment: workers who attended a typical college with its profile would make about $1,000 less.

The sortable table above lists the key figures for all 1,275 institutions in our study that remain open. The first column contains the median post-enrolment salary that our model predicts for each college, the second its actual median earnings, and the third its over- or under-performance. Clicking on a university pops up a window that shows the three factors with the biggest effect on the model's expectation. For example, Caltech's forecast earnings increase by $27,114 as a result of its best-in-the-country incoming SAT scores, another $9,234 thanks to its students' propensity to choose subjects like engineering, and a further $2,819 for its proximity to desirable employers in the Los Angeles area.

In an unexpected coincidence, it has come to our attention that the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, happens to have published its own "value-added" rankings using the scorecard data on the exact same day that we did (October 29th). Although their approach was broadly similar to ours, they looked at a much larger group of universities (including two-year colleges and vocational schools), and they appear to have used a very different set of variables. Above all, the Brookings numbers regard a college's curriculum as a significant part of its "value add", causing the top of its rankings to be dominated by engineering schools, and the bottom by art and religious institutions. In contrast, we treated fields of study as a reflection of student preferences, and tried to identify the colleges that offer the best odds of earning a decent living for people who do want to become artists or study in a Christian environment. Similarly, the Brookings rankings do not appear to weight SAT scores nearly as heavily as ours do, if they count them at all: colleges like Caltech and Yale, whose students subsequently earn far more money than those of an average university but significantly less than their elite test results would indicate, sit at the very bottom of The Economist 's list, whereas Brookings puts them close to the top.

It is important to clarify how our rankings should be interpreted. First, the scorecard data suffer from limitations. They only include individuals who applied for federal financial aid, restricting the sample to a highly unrepresentative subset of students that leaves out the children of most well-off parents. And they only track students' salaries for ten years after they start college, cutting off their trajectory at an age when many eventual high earners are still in graduate school and thus excluded from the sample of incomes. A college that produces hordes of future doctors will have far lower listed earnings in the database than one that generates throngs of, say, financial advisors, even though the two groups' incomes are likely to converge in their 30s.

Second, although we hope that our numbers do in fact represent the economic value added by each institution, there is no guarantee that this is true. Colleges whose earnings results differ vastly from the model's expectations might be benefiting or suffering from some other characteristic of their students that we neglected to include in our regression: for example, Gallaudet University, which ranks third-to-last, is a college for the deaf (which is why we excluded it from our table in print). It is also possible that highly ranked colleges simply got lucky, and that their future students are unlikely to make as much money as the entering class of 2001 did.

Finally, maximising earnings is not the only goal of a college, and probably not even the primary one. In fact, you could easily argue that "underperforming" universities like Yale and Swarthmore are actually making a far greater contribution to American society than overperformers like Washington & Lee, if they tend to channel their supremely talented graduates towards public service rather than Wall Street. For students who want to know which colleges are likely to boost their future salaries by the greatest amount, given their qualifications and preferences regarding career and location, we hope these rankings prove helpful. They should not be used for any other purpose.
CORRECTION: An eagle-eyed commenter has alerted us that all 20 listed campuses of Pennsylvania State University appeared with the same median earnings. Other keen observers have noted irregularities regarding a handful of colleges with similar names in different states. In response, we have reviewed the scorecard database, consolidated all colleges with multiple campuses but a single listed salary figure, identified and distinguished universities with overlapping names, re-run the regression, and revised the rankings and the text of this blog post. As a result, the top and bottom ten colleges published in our print issue no longer exactly match the ones in these updated rankings. However, the vast majority of universities moved by no more than a handful of places. Additionally, we have removed references to "graduates" and "alumni", to reflect the fact that the scorecard's income data do not distinguish between graduates and students who enrolled but did not graduate.

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AMERICAN universities claim to hate the simplistic, reductive college rankings published by magazines like US News , which wield ever-growing influence over where students attend. Many have even called for an information boycott against the authors of such ratings.

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Free personality test - take it to find out why our readers say that this personality test is so accurate, "it's a little bit creepy." No registration required!

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Fall 2017 class - you do not need to do this assignment for a grade.

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mbti mbti personality relationship career myers briggs meyers briggs psychology mind test questionnaire jung bsm consulting

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Career paths for the sixteen personality types

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This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

If you're fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren't sure how, our career guide can help you:

Get new ideas for fulfilling careers that do good

Compare your options

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It's based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford. We're a nonprofit, and everything we provide is free.
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Our career guide covers everything you need to know about how to find a fulfilling career that does good, from why you shouldn't "follow your passion," to why medicine and charity work aren't always the best ways to help others.

It's full of practical tips and exercises, and at the end, you'll have a draft of your new career plan.
Read our career guide
Or read the two-minute summary, or get the guide as a free book.

Research

The issue you work on is probably the most important factor determining your impact. It's important to focus on issues that are not only big, but also neglected and tractable. We think some such issues even threaten the long-run future of humanity - making them especially high priority.

The highest impact paths are those that put you in the best position to tackle the most pressing problems. To help you get ideas for ways to contribute, we review some common options and list some unusual but especially high-impact paths.

The series covers our most important and novel research findings about how to increase the impact of your career, including: what "doing good" even means, why reducing existential risk might be humanity's biggest and most neglected priority, and how to avoid accidentally making things worse.

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Our job board provides a curated list of publicly advertised vacancies that we think are particularly promising. We post roles that we believe are opportunities to either (and often both):

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Back in 2011, we helped found the effective altruism community. It's a group of people devoted to using evidence and reason to figure out the best ways to help others - whether through donations, political advocacy, or their careers. Learn more about the community and how it might be able to help you to have a more impactful career.
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We started 80,000 Hours when we were about to graduate from Oxford in 2011. Our aim was to provide the advice we wish we'd had back then: transparently explained, based on the best research available, and willing to ask the big questions. By doing this, we hope to get the next generation of leaders tackling the world's most pressing problems.
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Our aim is to help people tackle the world's biggest and most neglected problems, and our advice is aimed at people who have the good fortune to be able to make that their focus, as well as the security to change paths. Due to our limited capacity, some of our advice focuses on a narrow range of paths, and is especially aimed at talented college students and graduates aged 18-30, though many of the ideas we cover are relevant to everyone.
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Our advice is based on hundreds of expert interviews; what we've learned advising 4,000+ people one-on-one over 10 years; and where possible, the academic literature on global problems and career success. We're affiliated with the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.
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Reader stories

Katie Hearsum

Katie was working at a bank, but she had a feeling that she wanted to use her career to help others - she just wasn't sure exactly how. She spoke to an 80,000 Hours advisor who helped her realise she could have an impact by helping to improve the long-term future and connected her to a network of people working in this area. After exploring her options, Katie realised she had a strong personal fit for operations work and accepted a role in operations at Longview Philanthropy, an organisation aimed at reducing the risks of a major global catastrophe. Katie was promoted to head of operations a year later.
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Elika Somani

Elika started her career in global health, which she describes as "my first love, career wise". Over time, 80,000 Hours and the EA community helped her conclude that she could increase her expected impact by pivoting into biosecurity. She applied for, and was offered, the role of Fellow with the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. After speaking with an 80,000 Hours advisor, she decided to accept the job. She now conducts research on neglected problems in biosecurity, and also in clinical research ethics.
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Ethan Perez

Ethan Perez was studying computer science when he came across 80,000 Hours, which convinced him that the risk from advanced artificial intelligence was a highly pressing problem. After speaking with an 80,000 Hours advisor, he decided to work full time on AI safety instead of pursuing a career in self-driving car technology. He went on to write his PhD thesis on fixing undesirable behaviour in language models and took a role as a research scientist working on AI safety at Anthropic.
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This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. If you're fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren't sure how, we can help

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Occupation Finder : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Search: Use the drop-down menu in one or more columns to narrow your search. Sort: Use the arrows at the top of each column to sort alphabetically or numerically.