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

Libby Nelson is Vox's policy editor, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.

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:

payscale

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.

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