Data on Fordham students’ employment after graduation reveals pay gaps not only among recent Fordham grads from Gabelli and Rose Hill, but between genders as well. The information is available online at fordham.12twenty.com, which has a database of information including average salary, employers most heavily invested in Fordham’s student body and more.
The website has data from 98.7 percent of students of the Class of 2014, according to Stefany Fattor, the Fordham director of Career Services.
Based on data from 2009-2014, the statistics are incredibly accurate because they are not projections: they are real numbers. Not surprisingly, almost all jobs offered were in the tri-state area, which is defined on the website as the New York-Newark-Bridgeport metro area. However, it was interesting to discover that, after New York City, the city of Stamford employed the most Fordham students.
The average base salary varied depending on the Fordham college. For students in the Gabelli School of Business, the starting salary was $51,602. For Fordham College at Rose Hill, the beginning income was $35,671. Finally, the starting salary was $32,631 for students enrolled in Fordham College at Lincoln Center.
The gender pay gap was prevalent in the starting salaries of Fordham graduates. The average base salary for males was approximately $8,000 higher than it was for females. This wage gap exists despite the absence of any significant difference in the industries and companies in which males and females work.
There were a few corporations that set the bar extremely high in terms of starting compensation. Bank of America led in that category with a $71,667 average base salary per year. Goldman Sachs had the highest total compensation of $97,500. The compensation, according to the website, includes any bonus, stock option, or form of income provided to the employee in addition to the base salary.
One would expect that inflationary pressures caused incomes to rise in the past few years. However, average base salary has declined each year from 2009 to 2011, although income finally recovered when it reached $49,985 in 2014. The average signing bonus peaked in 2014 with an average of $9,091.
There was an interesting pattern that stood out from the rest of the data. “After the top four or five companies, there is a cluster of companies hiring just a few Fordham students. I think this is great because this shows how many different companies and opportunities New York City has to offer,” Fattor said.
Fordham students were highly diversified across a wide range of industries. Financial services and the media were the two biggest fields which Fordham students worked. Education, accounting and healthcare also constituted a large portion of the industries that employed Fordham students.
For Gabelli, the biggest employers were no surprise: JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC. The most interesting thing about the statistics is yet to come, however. “Most people won’t be surprised to learn that JP Morgan Chase is the biggest employer of Gabelli graduates. They may not know, however, that JP Morgan Chase actually employed the most liberal arts students as well,” Fattor said.
Computer Systems and Management Applications was the major with the highest starting income. Students with that major earned on average $100,000, albeit with a small sample size. Legal and policy studies, applied accounting and finance, public accounting, and finance round out the top five highest-paying majors.
