It Really Doesn't Matter Personally or Professionally If You Went to Harvard or State U.

A few days after most of the high-school graduating Class of 2014 decided where they are going to college in the fall by sending a deposit to secure their spot on a campus comes a new study that finds, despite conventional wisdom, it doesn’t really matter to your eventual well-being where you attend school.

Indeed, there isn’t much of a difference between the most selective, top colleges in the U.S. News & World Report rankings and everyone else. Also, there is no difference between typically high-priced private colleges and lower-priced public universities.

Those are the findings from the Gallup-Purdue Index released today. In a day and age when the outcome of college is often measured by the job you have and how much you earn, it aims at showing how much a college degree contributes to a “great jobs” and “great lives.”

The bottom line: a great life and a great job is less about where you go to college and more about what you do when you’re there. The survey found that if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person and encouraged them to follow their dreams their chances of being more engaged in life and work more than doubled. The same was true for graduates with outside-the-classroom experiences that so define college for most of us, internships, research projects, and campus clubs and athletic teams.

But here’s the problem: Only 14% of graduates recalled having a professor who made them excited about learning and encouraged them. And just 6% said they had meaningful experiences that connected their classroom learning to the wider world.

While for the most part it doesn’t matter where you went to school in terms of your workforce engagement, there was a key exception: those who went to larger colleges (10,000 undergraduates and above) were more engaged than those who went to smaller schools. Perhaps it’s because larger schools have the size to offer a broader array of opportunities.

The index—which surveyed some 30,000 bachelor-degree recipients and 1,500 associate-degree holders—measured well-being on five dimensions: social, financial, sense of purpose, connectedness to their community, and physical health. It also looked how engaged workers are on the job.

The survey found that 39% of college graduates are engaged in their job, compared to 30% of the U.S. population. While a spread of nine percentage points might sound like much, Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, called it significant.

While more male college graduates are employed full-time than female graduates, women with a college degree are more engaged in their work than men. And what you majored in matters to your happiness. While science and business majors are more likely to be employed full-time than other majors, those who majored in the arts and humanities are more engaged in their work than anyone else.

Here are five other major takeaways from the index:

1. Only 11% of college graduates are thriving in all five dimensions of well-being. More than 1 in 6 aren’t thriving in any.

2. The higher the debt level of a graduate the lower their well-being—three times less if they had between $20,000 and $40,000 in loans (average graduate now has about $30,000 in student loans). They were also less likely to start a business.

3. If graduates are engaged at work, they are some five times more likely to be thriving in all five factors of well-being.

4. Graduates who say they were supported in college are six times more likely to be emotionally attached to their alma mater.

5. Graduates of for-profit colleges are less engaged at work and report lower well-being.

Jeffrey Selingo is author of College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, and of the forthcoming e-book, MOOC U, an inside look at the world of massive open online courses, due out this spring from Simon & Schuster. He is a contributing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

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Photo: Marcio Jose Bastos Silva / shutterstock

Remix: LinkedIn Pulse