First Destination
We are gearing up to begin collecting First Destination data for students who will graduate in Spring 2024, as well as any students who graduated in Summer or Fall 2023. Students who know their plans for after graduation – whether that be with an employer, enrolling in graduate school, or service in the military, or anything else – are welcome to reply early to the short-form version of the survey in CareerLink. Late in the summer, we will follow up with those graduates and invite them to participate in a long-form version of the survey, and continue data collection through the end of the year via phone interviews and information gathered from the National Student Clearinghouse and LinkedIn.
In our second year of the First Destination project, collecting information from 2022-2023 graduates, the University of Maine System achieved a 53% knowledge rate (the percentage of the graduating cohort for whom we have data), an increase of 8.6% from the first year. This information about recent graduates is valuable for a wide range of stakeholders including institutional research, career centers, alumni and development offices, and chief academic officers. Summaries of recent graduates’ outcomes, as well as responses to survey items about careers services and other university programs, are available in a Power BI dashboard and in one-page infographics for each campus. The one-page infographic reports for UMaine and UMaine Machias are here: