Employment Outcomes Support in Texas

Description

The Ray Marshall Center will provide technical assistance, research support, as well as strategic, tactical, and operational guidance for colleges seeking to understand the role their educational programs play in the labor market across Texas. The EOS Project provides colleges with greater flexibility and additional useful information in relation to other types of partnerships. For example, while the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) coalition provides information on cohort earnings and industry participation for program graduates, it reports by combining yearly graduates at the program level into groups of cohorts, requires notable delays in accessing results, and neglects to report non-employment. The Ray Marshall Center’s EOS Project allows colleges to provide student data that meets their specific needs, allowing disaggregation by gender, race, ethnicity, and economic background, or for specific populations of interest for the college, such as scholarship recipients. Additionally, the EOS Project will report on employment rates, a key feature needed to understand the labor market success of their graduates. Unemployment Insurance wage records at the Ray Marshall Center are updated every six months, significantly reducing the delays colleges might experience using other potential partnerships. Colleges will also be able to measure initial employment outcomes (e.g., employment, earnings, and industry) in the quarter immediately following their quarter of graduation as well as patterns of employment in subsequent quarters. While employer information must be masked, the EOS will be able to provide the number of jobs a graduate has in any given quarter, as well as information on job changes over time. Though not all of these pieces of information will be universally useful to colleges, they provide greater flexibility to meet specific needs for each participating college. Unlike other partnerships, the EOS Project also has more flexibility in reporting on small cell sizes, permitting relatively small cells when used in combination with other techniques, for example, providing ranges of earnings.