Cold Hard Numbers: Post-Secondary Education in the US

I've had a love affair with the Census Bureau for a while now. Despite all the bad horrible things about it (what happens if I'm beyond binary gender categories? why doesn't it count gay families? what box do multi-racial, multi-ethnic people check?) I still love it. Numbers are almost as convincing as maps.

While the Census will always be #1, I just discovered the wonders of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this weekend. I am the ultimate nerd.

Because I'm still learning how to navigate the BLS databases, I kept stumbling onto random pages. Like this one.

Go ahead. Scroll through the list of post-secondary teaching categories. Find your profession. See how many jobs are out there and where they are.

Say I'm thinking of getting an areas studies faculty job.

Lucky for me there were, as of May 2008, 7,570 Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teachers (postsecondary) employed in the US. Their mean income (i.e. average income) was $70,560.

I want to know a little more. So I'll click on area, ethnic, cultural studies teachers. Now I'm getting some serious break downs.

The lowest 10% of Area Studies faculty (i.e. me) made $33,420 and less. The rockstars and other top 10% made $120,720 or more.

Vast majority of my colleagues (i.e. 6,430) work in colleges, universities, and professional schools. But the junior college faculty raked in more at $77,730.

Area studies folks were most concentrated in New York (1,170), but California pays its faculty the best (at a cool average $97,240). Illinois's area studies faculty make up 0.001% of the state's total population. That makes me feel important.

Apparently if you throw a rock in Ann Arbor you might just hit an area studies faculty member (the highest concentration in any city in the nation at 0.069% of total metropolitan population). But the best money is in the San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA Metropolitan Division (i.e. bay area) at $139,950/year. Dang.

Don't get sucked into the BLS blackhole. These numbers do not predict the future, they just report what it looked like in May 2008. I simply found this all incredibly interesting, though potentially depressing.

Want to see what the non-academic world looks like? Practicing anthropologists, historians, and sociologists are enumerated in the Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations category. Don't forget, per the government job post, that anthropologists might work jobs classified as historian, geographer, or research.

Watch out for the numbers rabbithole. You can spend hours (or an entire weekend) looking at statistics and numbers. But at the end of the day, they don't really capture all the complexity of real life, right? (Written like a true anthropologist.) Still, I thought it was more interesting, potentially helpful, info that I should (i.e. wanted to) share.