Business Insider released a list of 30 “colleges” with the highest starting salaries. The top of the list is dominated by tech oriented universities followed by Ivy League schools.
Caltech–$82,000
MIT–$78,800
Stanford–$73,300
Carnegie Mellon Univ. (CMU)–$70,900
Princeton–$69,800
Harvard–$69,200
Univ. of Pennsylvania–$68,100
Yale–$66,800
Dartmouth College–$66,300
Columbia–$66,000
Rice–$65,700
Cornell–$65,600
UCal-Berkeley–$65,400
Duke–$65,300
Johns Hopkins (JHU)–$63,200
Brown–$63,000
Notre Dame–$62,500
Georgetown–$60,400
Vanderbilt–$60,100
Tufts–$60,400
WashUStL–$60,100
Northwestern Univ.–$59,500
Virginia–$59,500
Univ. of Southern Calif. (USC)–$59.400
Michigan–$59,300
New York Univ. (NYU)–$58,700
Univ. of Chicago–$58,100
UCLA–$57,500
Emory–$56,700
Wake Forest Univ. (WFU)–$56,000
Northwestern, USC & NYU are weighed down by low starting salaries for theater majors.
Slight correction for thread. This list is a list of salaries for “the best 30 colleges”.
The Business Insider article has a few typos. For example, the lead-in states that the salary for Caltech is $84,000, but the chart shows it at $82,000 per year.
Also, there seems to be either typos or inconsistency in ranking for two schools listed either incorrectly or in reverse order at #19 & #20. Minor error, however.
Also, there are no LACs on this list which suggests that the article may have only examined the Top 30 ranked National Universities.
Caveat emptor. This list is from GoBankRates.com, which only looked at the USNWR list of national universities, so LACs aren’t represented.
It also didn’t look at schools beyond the USNWR top 30, so this is actually a ranking of the top 30 schools by salary, not a list of the schools with the top 30 salaries.
Gee, starting salaries for engineers and accountants are higher than for social work and humanities. Wow! These lists are potentially useful when comparing apples to apples (Cal Tech vs MIT, perhaps, or Williams vs Amherst), but are so horribly misused in general terms. Many of us know that, but we see thread after thread on CC with parents/students drawing mistaken conclusions on the quality of a school based on these numbers. “I can’t go to Oberlin, because their graduates who live in rural Ohio make less than Georgia Tech graduates who live in Silicon Valley!”
Another note, the salaries here look eerily similar (actually, in most cases identical) to the PayScale listings. I wonder how much work they really did to put together this list.
@Publisher : BI crossed-referenced two of its analyses. Graduate earnings for Swarthmore and Williams were not high enough to make the cut-off at that time. Amherst was NA. The second analysis used some initial screening that may have eliminated CMC.
But there is no denying that Claremont McKenna College, Amherst College & Williams College & Swarthmore College produce incredibly successful graduates by any reasonable measure.
Methodology: The report used the US Department of Education’s College Scorecard to highlight the median earnings of students from over 1,400 colleges 10 years after starting their studies.
It’s a pure list of just data on schools with the highest salaries. it’s not a list of the top schools and their salaries or a list of schools that people think have the best salaries.
Unlike the list posted in post number 5, this list doesn’t include surveys or SAT scores (Post 5’s methodology is "The list ranks colleges by median starting salary, average SAT score, and a survey that asked more than 1,000 Business Insider readers to choose the colleges that best prepare their students for success after graduation. ")
@suzyQ7: You are incorrect. That is not the current Business Insider list used to start this thread as it is from 2015 & none of the schools match the list which started this thread. But you are correct in that it matches the misstated title of this thread (which I made a note of correction in the first post #1 above).
Nevertheless, it is an interesting list. Thank you for sharing !
Alternate explanation:
They don’t “produce” such people.
They tend to attract the kind of students who in most cases would have been about as successful even if they had chosen other colleges. http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322
@tk21769: The August, 1999 study that you cite in post #13 above can be used to support either viewpoint. It’s conclusions read more like a politician catering to both sides of the aisle in fear of losing a single vote, rather than resulting in any meaningful insights.
Some quotes from the study:
“On the payoff to attending an elite college.”
“Evidently students’ motivation, ambition, and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success then the average academic ability of their classmates.”
Yet…
" Students who attend colleges with higher average tuition costs or spending tend to earn higher incomes later on."
“Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.”
I don’t begrudge some people for using ROI as part of their college choice calculus, but ROI is an impoverished metric for measuring the value of an education, and starting salary is an impoverished metric for evaluating ROI.
