Ninety-six percent of Boston College Class of 2018 graduates are currently employed; in graduate school; partaking in service or volunteering; or have a fellowship, scholarship, or grant, according to data released by Institutional Research, Planning & Assessment and the Career Center. The first-destination placement rate has remained steady at 96 percent over the past five years.
Among the 73.3 percent of graduates that are employed, the most popular industries are health care, financial services, banking, and consulting. Ten percent of the class found employment in each of these industries, with the exception of consulting, where 9 percent of students found employment. The most popular employers are PricewaterhouseCoopers, Oracle, and Citi.
“The biggest success [from the survey] is the volume and number of employers and graduate schools who want access to our students,” said Joseph Du Pont, the associate vice president for Student Affairs and Career Services.
Of the 19 percent of graduates who ended up in graduate school, 66 percent are pursuing a master’s degree, 16 percent a law degree, 10 percent a doctorate, 6 percent a Doctor of Medicine, and 2 percent a certificate. The most popular graduate school destinations were the BC Graduate School of Education, Boston University, and the BC Graduate School of Management.
A little over 2 percent of the class is engaged in volunteer or service work, and 1.2 percent have a fellowship, scholarship, or grant. Thirteen members of the Class of 2018 have a Fulbright Fellowship.
Seventy-seven percent of the class now lives in the Northeast, while 7 percent live in the West, 7 percent in the South, 5 percent in the Midwest, and 3 percent in another country.
Du Pont emphasized that since this is first-destination data, people should look only look at it as a snapshot in time for these graduates.
“That’s really, that’s all it is—but it helps us identify trends,” Du Pont said. “And I think the the fact that’s BC students do so well, it’s really a reflection of the education you’re getting and the quality of the students, and the fact that the graduate school and employment community recognizes that.”
While the data has a knowledge rate of 75 percent, Du Pont clarified that only 50 percent of graduates actually took the survey. The University used other means of verifying students’ placement, such as looking at LinkedIn profiles, to increase the knowledge rate—or the overall percentage of graduates for whom post-graduation data was collected.
Du Pont said that BC is committed to not making students fill out a mandatory “cap and gown survey,” so it tries to encourage students to take the survey from as early as March of their senior year to as late as the December after they graduated.
“The fact that we have a knowledge rate of 75 percent is actually in the world of surveys incredibly high—we’re very fortunate in that sense,” Du Pont said. “Of course, we’d always want more students to complete it.”
Featured Image by Celine Lim / Heights Editor
