Alumni Outcomes Project

Boise State’s 10-county service region includes the following counties: Ada, Adams, Boise, Canyon, Elmore, Gem, Owyhee, Payette, Valley, and Washington. Through the analysis, EMSI determined whether matched alumni were residing in or out of the service region. Overall, nearly two-thirds of matched alumni (64%) reside in the 10-county region. Moreover, Figure 1 illustrates that a higher proportion of alumni who graduated more recently live in the region compared to matched alumni who graduated several decades ago.

Using a crosswalk from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EMSI matched occupational information with degree information to classify employment as being “In Field” or “Out of Field” of study (2-digit CIP to 2-digit SOC crosswalk). As illustrated in Figure 2, 78% of matched graduates were classified as employed in field, with 21% employed out of field, and 2% without a listing for current employment. Note that Post-Master’s degrees (Ed.S.) are excluded from the chart due to a small number of matches.

To further explore whether rates of employment in field differ based on the number of years since graduation, data for bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates were examined further. In other words, are graduates from earlier years more likely to work in field and more recent graduates less likely to do so? See Figures 3 and 4 below.

Figure 3 illustrates that baccalaureate graduates from the earliest years (1960s and 1970s) and from the most recent years (2010 through Dec 2017) are employed “in field” at the lowest rates. This may reflect that graduates from the 1960s and 1970s likely have reached retirement age and, thus, have progressed beyond their main years of employment. Conversely, newer graduates are at the entering stages of their careers and may be still determining their career paths and/or accumulating experiences to assist in their entre to the career of their choice. Even still, 74% of the matched recent bachelor’s degree graduates are considered to be employed in field.

Master’s degree graduates, on the other hand, are fairly stable in terms of employment in field regardless of the recency of their degree award. Overall, 81% of master’s degree graduates were classified as employed in field.

Two interactive dashboards are available at www.boisestate.edu/ir and enable further exploration of the data.

The EMSI Alumni Insight service provides valuable information about the graduates of Boise State University. As may be expected, the data are more complete for recent graduates and for graduates in certain professions. On the whole, nearly 80% of all graduates who were matched are classified as employed in field. In addition, a higher proportion of more recent graduates are living in the region (over two-thirds) compared to graduates from decades ago. Because the match rates vary between and within academic colleges, the information produced for specific departments or fields of study will be more valuable to some areas over others.

# = Number of alumni who were matched (not total number of alumni in the population)
% = Match Rate; percentage of alumni who were matched