Bryn Athyn College Alumni Magazine Winter 2015 | Page 36

The graduating class of 2015 included 35 Bachelor of Arts and 13 Bachelor of Science recipients.

BACCALAUREATE
GRADUATE OUTCOMES
by Allen Bedford, Dean of Academics

T

he last two sentences of Bryn Athyn College’s
mission statement read, “This education challenges students to develop spiritual purpose,
to think broadly and critically from a variety of perspectives, and to build intellectual and practical skills.
The ultimate purpose is to enhance students’ civil,
moral, and spiritual life, and to contribute to human
spiritual welfare.” While these worthy aspirations resist simple assessment, certain indicators that college
graduates are living fulfilling, creative, resourceful
lives that allow them to be generous, caring, and competent members of society may serve as reasonable
measures that touch on these deeper goals.
Bryn Athyn College has been tracking recent
graduates’ outcomes and has identified three categories that represent institutional success: full-time employment in a degree-dependent position; continuing
education at the graduate level; and “purposeful engagement.” “Purposeful engagement” includes activities other than employment or graduate school that
the graduate is committed to doing by choice, such as
stay-at-home parenting, working on an independent
professional endeavor, volunteering, or traveling.
Many institutions track graduates’ outcomes
in terms of employment, and include both full-time
employment in non-degree-dependent positions and
part-time employment in this general category. Bryn
Athyn reports its graduates’ employment outcomes
broken into various categories and provides two composite outcomes. One composite outcome includes

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any form of employment and the other includes only
full-time employment in a degree-dependent position.
The graph shows the outcomes of the 150
graduates who earned their baccalaureates in 20102014 (we wait a full year to report the outcomes of
the class and so the May 2015 graduates are not yet
included).
Going with the more inclusive composite, for
three of the last five graduating classes 100% of the
graduates have been employed, in graduate school,
or “purposefully engaged.” Overall, 98.7% of the
graduates in all five years combined are in at least
one of these categories. Going with the more restrictive composite that counts only full-time employment in a degree-dependent position, attending
graduate school, or being “purposefully engaged,”
we find 86% of graduates in at least one of these categories.
We include all recent graduates in these measures, though we have no information on two of
them. We report as a combined group the percent
of graduates who are unemployed or who have an
unknown status. Only 1.3% of the 2010-14 graduates
are in this combined category.
These results compare well with those of other
institutions. The Center on Education and the
Workforce (CEW), Georgetown University, studies
employment outcomes for college graduates and
has produced several robust reports that anyone