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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2015
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
Gender gap looms large for recent Penn graduates Women earn significantly less than men 10 years after graduating from Penn RUIHONG LIU Staff Reporter
A report released by College Scorecard suggests that Penn is
worth the price tag, with Penn alumni earning a median salary of $78,200 10 years after graduation. But men and women may reap different benefits. The earning gap for Penn alumni is modest within the first year of graduation — a $2,000 to $4,000 gap depending
on degree — but it climbs to a gap ranging from $15,000 to $100,000 in ten years, according to data released by Career Services. The gap is largest for engineering students ten years after graduation — men earn a yearly average of $106,339 more than women.
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According to a recent New York Times article combing through the College Scorecard data, schools such as Duke, Princeton, Cornell, MIT and Yale all see gender divides in salaries ten years after graduation. At Duke, the difference between men and women is $29,900; at Princeton, the difference is $47,700. MIT, with a difference of $58,100, has the largest earning gap. The College Scorecard, created by the U.S Department of Education, traces annual costs, typical total debts, graduation rates and salaries in nearly every university and college in America from 1996 through 2015. Aiming to provide students and their families a “truer picture on college cost and value,” the report forgoes traditional ranking methods such as
acceptance rate and academic reputation, and instead focusing on “the earnings of former college graduates and new data on student debt.” According to the scorecard, 89 percent of Penn students earned on average more than those with only a high school diploma. While Penn’s annual cost (the average net price or federal financial aid recipients) is $22,948, higher than the national average of $16,789, Penn graduates earns an average of $43,857 higher than the national average in ten years. Among fellow Ivy League universities, Penn ranks number two in salary after attending only after Harvard, whose graduates earn $87,200 ten years after graduation. While many medical colleges occupy the top spots in the charts, MIT,
Stanford and Georgetown are among universities whose graduates have the highest annual salaries. The report also measures socioeconomic diversity in each school. At Penn, 14 percent of students have a family income less than $40,000 and receive an income-based federal Pell Grant to help pay for college. President Barack Obama commented on this new data release in his weekly address on September 12. “Right now, however, many existing college rankings reward schools for spending more money and rejecting more students — at a time when America needs our colleges to focus on affordability and supporting all students who enroll,” Obama said. “That doesn’t make sense, and it has to change.”
CANCELLING ABROAD
posted, Wapner said she wasn’t surprised. But once she knew that she wouldn’t study abroad, she described the process of withdrawing her participation as “confusing” and “unclear.” On Penn Abroad’s website, the only policies listed in relation to withdrawing from a study abroad program after being accepted detail the refunds students will be eligible for when withdrawing after paying tuition. Blanket solutions After receiving the official notice that she was ineligible to study abroad, Wapner decided to take a leave of absence for the year. From notifying King’s College of her canceled participation to applying for the leave itself, Wapner said she felt that the administration kept her in the dark. “Once I got that first email, it really wasn’t clear to me at all whether there was anything I needed to do. Nobody told
me whether I was supposed to reach out to KCL or whether Penn would do that for me,” she said. She also added that she had just gotten official notice from King’s College in September that she was no longer registered to be a student. After receiving the original email, Wapner said that she almost immediately heard from her advisor Rebecca Poyourow who brought up the idea of taking a leave of absence — an idea Poyourow had brought up when she first learned of Wapner’s mental health struggles, even though at the time Wapner was still eligible to study abroad. Penn Abroad, which is responsible for dealing with students withdrawing participation in study abroad programs, said that each situation is handled on a case-by-case basis. “There are a number of reasons why a student might decide to withdraw from a study abroad program, and the process will vary depending on the timing and nature of the request. In every instance, we always work with the student and their undergraduate school to facilitate the process,” Penn Abroad Associate Director Danielle Scugoza wrote in an email. Wapner, however, felt like her situation was handled with a “blanket solution” by the administration. “I was very much pushed into a year-long leave just because it felt like that was the easiest thing for the administration to deal with,” Wapner said. In addition to students withdrawing from specific programs, Scugoza added that there are some instances that could cause Penn Abroad to cancel a program altogether, including natural disasters, civil unrest, public health outbreaks, militancy or conflict. “In the event an international incident affects the Penn community, the Global Incident Management Team convenes to coordinate a university-wide response and provide immediate assistance to travelers that are directly impacted,” Scugoza wrote. She added that students wishing to travel on a Penn-related program to a country listed as a “Risk Region” must gain approval from Penn before going. For Wapner, though, it is not Penn’s commitment to ensuring its students’ safety that she questions, but rather the way it handles the logistics of achieving that end. “The entire process was just not very clearly laid out for me, and it actually became very frustrating,” she said. “For someone who is already struggling with mental health, I really felt like I just didn’t get the support I needed from the administration at Penn. I feel like they should have done more,” she said.
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would have been eligible for after studying French for several years. It seemed as though everything was in order. But Wapner had struggled with mental health issues since arriving at Penn. By the spring of her sophomore year, her mental health had begun to take a toll on her grades. Wapner said that even after speaking to her professors and seeking help at Counseling and Psychological Services and with a private psychologist, it became obvious to her midway through the spring that her grades could interfere with her plans to go to London. “I had a bad last semester, so even though I had picked classes and registered with the program, I knew I still might not be able to go,” Wapner said. When the email came after her final grades had been
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