AUGUSTA, Maine - The Maine Department of Labor has received more than $1 million in federal money to support a joint initiative to document the relationship between higher education and workers' earnings.
Under the Workforce Data Quality Initiative, the DOL is marrying information about the degrees and certificates students obtain with aggregate data about the salaries students earn after getting a job here in Maine.
"So what we're looking at is how many people get employed and what are they earning based on what degree or certificate they earn within the Maine colleges and universities," says Maine DOL spokesperson Julie Rabinowitz.
Rabinowitz says the Labor Department has been collecting the data for three-and-a-half years and went public with the information in August.
Currently, the initiative involves the University of Maine System and the Community College System. Rabinowitz says the department hopes to expand the data collection to include all of state's higher-level training providers and Maine's private colleges and universities.
