Chart: Which colleges have graduates who say they have meaningful work?

PayScale, which releases an annual ranking of colleges by graduates' salaries, also asks another question: Does your work make the world a better place?

Here are the colleges whose graduates (at least those who fill out the PayScale surveys, a self-selecting group) overwhelmingly say yes:

Religious colleges are pretty well-represented on this list, as are colleges that specialize in the health professions.

What about colleges whose graduates don't think they're doing much good? The bottom of the list is populated with art and design schools — the Rhode Island School of Design, School of Visual Arts, and Fashion Institute of Technology among them. This could be because graduates are humble about how much art can really improve the world. Or, more likely, it's because PayScale's surveys don't include people who are self-employed, and so overrepresent would-be artists who now have desk jobs.

Salary doesn't seem to correlate with whether people think their jobs are meaningful: the bottom 10 on the list have a higher median salary than the top 10.

We're here to shed some clarity

One of our core beliefs here at Vox is that everyone needs and deserves access to the information that helps them understand the world, regardless of whether they can pay for a subscription. With the 2024 election on the horizon, more people are turning to us for clear and balanced explanations of the issues and policies at stake. We’re so grateful that we’re on track to hit 85,000 contributions to the Vox Contributions program before the end of the year, which in turn helps us keep this work free. We need to add 2,500 contributions this month to hit that goal. Will you make a contribution today to help us hit this goal and support our policy coverage? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via