Your post 277 stated, “Is Payscale (“PS”), from which Forbes cites median salaries for each of its ranked colleges, still only using baccalaureate degree holders for its salary reporting? They weigh this variable at 20%, which is pretty significant.” You implied Forbes’ ranking weights Payscale salary at 20%. I replied saying that the 20% salary weighting you mentioned was computed from half (10%) CS salary and half (10%) Payscale salary, rather than all (20%) Payscale. I see no further reason to rehash the previous comments from many dozens of posts earlier , but if you read each of my replies, it should be clear what I was replying to and how I came to the conclusion, and the later posts did reply to the bulk of content in your posts. However, the later replies were not talking about comments in post #277. They were talking about the comments quoted in that reply.
This is a non-entity, because you keep ignoring the fact that CS doesn’t compute a median salary for a college as a whole, but PS does. How many times do I have to say this?
Me: My problem is your constant argumentative mode, probably remnants of our run-ins in the past – if you don’t remember as on the UC board.
What you’re not following is that that is your style. You get into these insignificant arguments and you latch onto them as if your life depended on it, and our run-in on the UC board was just a couple of yeas ago. You kept arguing from a UCB study that stated that the college board tests were completely insignificant, when the UC was using them to find nuggets – not necessarily high test scorers – who scored well in relation to their economic status.
CS presents the median by major as well as overall. A user can consider either or both. I personally find it meaningful to control for major when comparing salary, so you are comparing mechanical engineering majors at college A to mechanical engineering majors at college B… rather than comparing the median overall salary tech college A with mostly tech majors to the median overall salary at LAC college B with mostly humanities. majors. I believe Forbes does not control for majors in their rankings.
By your selective quoting you’re again missing that CS presents data from a specific economic demographic that may be only 20% of a college’s baccalaureates, or probably even less in some instances.
I don’t disagree that it would be good to look at salaries by specificity of major as you mentioned here, but I’m speaking of Forbes one-figure presentation of median salaries for each college, which again, is in what PS particularly specializes and also presents. They are a salary-information gathering entity that people use to secure, let’s say “just” compensation when looking for a job. College Scoreboard is not wired for that.
Let me include an example. Say someone, person x, graduates from college X with a baccalaureate in Computer Science. Say another, y, graduates from college Y with a Biochemistry degree, both graduating in year 0. Person x goes to work in for a tech company and after 10 years she makes $175,000/year. Person y takes a gap year, applies and is accepted into college Z’s medical school. So in year 1, y enters med school and graduates in year 5. Person y then enters an internship/residency and it goes from years 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. During this time he makes $45,000/year.
What happens if y and x are included in CS’s salary data, how would you perceive the disparity in salary at 10 years, $45? v. $175k? Is it that x has clearly done better? What happens if neither is included in CS’s data, which means that only x would be included in PS’s data if she participates in its survey. These are extreme examples, but they do happen. For those colleges that send more students to med school, Forbes presentation wouldn’t reflect the medians correctly.
But I don’t think that CS should be or can be weighted at 10% because that’s not how CS is wired. PS’s goal is more towards what Forbes is presenting, precisely or imprecisely.
And I’m not sure why you quoted that last blurb because it’s pretty obvious that there is nowhere near an accurate predictor of salary medians for each college. And when they start throwing in ROI, then it surpasses the ludicrous.
