Jessai Flores, Illustrations Editor

The Yale Office of Career Strategy recently published the “First Destination Report” for the Yale class of 2022, revealing how these recent alumni chose to begin their post-Yale lives.

The report evaluates data from a survey administered in April of 2022. The survey was sent to 1,448 graduates and completed by 1,241 of them, representing an 85.7 percent knowledge rate. All data was recorded within six months of graduation. The report contains data on post-graduate plans, summer choices, location, salary and further degrees pursued, among other factors. The report was published on the OCS website, and the entire report with all of its data can be obtained by email request to the office.

“This is obviously a very interesting class, because they were hit with two summers of COVID,” said Jeanine Dames, director of OCS. “What was interesting during COVID was that there were things like language study and summer abroad that just shut down. There was not a huge pullback in job opportunities.”

During the summer of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 18.4 percent of respondents reported that they pursued language study, including study abroad programs. The following summer of 2020 saw language study fall to 3.2 percent, and the summer of 2021 saw an even lower slump of 1.6 percent.

Inversely to language study, participation in paid internships rose over time. During the summer of 2019, just 13.9 percent of respondents spent the summer in a paid internship. In the summer of 2020, however, this number nearly doubled to 26.4 percent, increasing again to 42.2 percent in 2021.

No other surveyed categories of summer choices showed a notable fluctuation in participation over time.

The report also details data on the size of the current employer workforce. The size of the organizations that 2022 graduates have joined is broken down by employee groups of more than 500, 500-251, 250-101, 100-51, 50-11 and 10-1. The over-500 category held the majority of graduates, with 53.7 percent of employed respondents falling into this category. The only other category to break a 10 percent share of respondents is the 50-11 employee category, encompassing 17.1 percent of employed respondents.

According to Laurie Coppola, senior associate director of OCS, one possible reason for such a large percentage of graduates working at companies with between 11 and 50 employees is due to changes in the tech industry. Coppola said that, taking into account recent layoffs, jobs in the tech industry still exist for Yale graduates, but possibly not in larger companies.

According to the report, only 8.7 percent of graduates now reside outside of the U.S. This is lower than the percentage of students that originated from outside of the U.S., Dames said. Dames added that many of these international students who are choosing to stay in the U.S. may be doing so only short term — they may have received the Optional Practical Training extension of their F-1 status, she said, and will reside in the US for a couple of years with the intention of returning to their home country.

“Particularly for STEM students, if they receive the OPT, they can stay in the United States for two years,” said Kristin McJunkins, director of health professions advising and STEM connect at OCS. 

Other than the 8.7 percent of respondents that chose to move abroad, 88.9 percent of respondents have chosen to remain within the United States. Of these respondents, 73.4 percent chose to live in either New York, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts or Washington D.C. Other top locations post-graduation included the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, Canada and China. 

The report also ranked the most popular industries of employment for graduates — finance, academia, technology, consulting and healthcare being the top five and accounting for 67 percent of the class of 2022. These categories represent the industry a graduate works for, and not the specific job role of the graduate.

“There’s another reason that education rates as number two, and one of the first ones is the research,” Dames said. “Students have relationships with the faculty already here. Many times we’ve already worked with them.”

Finance, consulting, laboratory research, software development and policy/academic/literary research were the top five functional employment categories, which represent the specific job function of the graduate. 

The Office of Career Strategy is located at 55 Whitney Avenue.