@simba9 : Do you see the irony of your post #19 ??? 
As others have stated, salaries are very much industry biased. As an example, since this was a business oriented post, many business students will track toward finance , banking, consulting. They will make more (some much more) than any of the school averages as a first yr IB analyst will make 120-150k, consulting 75-90k, etc. Even a corp finance 1st yr at a major company will make 65k+ in a rotational program. Engineers will make 70k+.
I guess the useful part of the list is taking the names and researching the individual schools to determine their emphasis. Some will be very well rounded. Others will appeal to a more business, tech, stem, student body. For those, the expectation is top job, top salary. That’s why kids go there.
The Wall Street Journal published a list of starting salaries. The list is part of the WSJ/THE Rankings of US Colleges published on Thursday, September 6, 2018 in a special supplement to the newspaper. With my copy of that section of the WSJ by my side, I will list the surprising top starting salaries out of the 500 schools ranked by the Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education in an upcoming thread. Until today, I had never hears of the top two schools.
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With 94.6% of the undergraduates reporting from the class of 2017, the AVG WPI salary was $66,983. Stevens Institute of Technology boast an even higher figure. Both are usually higher than RPI’s… I’m wondering how the “Business Insider” collects their data.
Stevens Institute of Technology starting salary of $84,600 ranks among the top ten in the WSJ/THE College Rankings September, 2018.
This needs fixing… Using 2 year old data from college scorecard. …
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.
→ 0) Colorado school of mines 82,100
- Caltech–$82,000
- MIT–$78,800
→ 3) RPI 77k
→ 4) Georgia Tech 76,000
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Stanford–$73,300
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Carnegie Mellon Univ. (CMU)–$70,900
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Princeton–$69,800
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Harvard–$69,200
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Univ. of Pennsylvania–$68,100
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Yale–$66,800
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Dartmouth College–$66,300
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Columbia–$66,000
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Rice–$65,700
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Cornell–$65,600
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UCal-Berkeley–$65,400
Oh, I see what they did “30 Best Colleges”. So it’s not a comprehensive list.
At the info session we attended yesterday, MIT stated that its students start off at an average salary of $88K.
Should not be surprising that engineering-heavy schools and Wall Street / consulting targets do well in these comparisons.
Rather than start a new thread, I will list the highest paying starting salaries out of 500 schools from the WSJ/THE College Rankings which were published on September 6, 2018 (I have my WSJ College Rankings supplement in hand):
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Albany Coll. of Pharmacy & Health Sciences–$117,333
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MCPHS University (Boston)–$114,167
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MIT–$91,667
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Harvard–$91,200
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Babson College–$87,867
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Georgetown–$85,800
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Stevens Inst. of tech.–$84,600
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Stanford–$84,200
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WPI–$80,167
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Univ. of Penn–$80,100
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RPI–$79,733
12 Rose Hulman Institute of Tech.–$79,100 -
Princeton–$77,833
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Colorado School of Mines–$77,500
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Duke—$77,100
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Lehigh–$76,900
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Carnegie Mellon–$76,667
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Columbia–$75,433
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Caltech–$75,333
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Georgia Tech–$74,767
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Yale–$74,467
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Wash. & Lee–$74,267
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Cornell–$72,200
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Notre Dame–$70,367
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Fairfield University–$69,100
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Lafayette College–$68,700
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Case Western Reserve–$68,500
28)Claremont McKenna–$68,333 -
Dartmouth College–$68,300
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Johns Hopkins–$68,300
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USC–$68,067
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Bucknell–$68,033
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Boston College–$67,900
I cannot find Harvey Mudd College among the list of 500 schools ranked by the WSJ/THE.
If I had to guess, I think that the starting salary for Harvey Mudd grads would be in the $80s.
Some of the lists have Army and Navy, but not USAFA. Are the lists just reported salaries from those graduates who responded to the survey, just those who have jobs? Are grad school students included as a $0? Are they including those who joined the Peace Corps or Americorps? Is a chemical engineer from, say, Maryland not making as much as a chemical engineer from Hopkins, even if they are working side by side? Is it perhaps the new teachers or history majors bringing down the average from the big universities?
Re # 28, average or median?
The data is a bit meaningless because as we all know, certain majors will pay a lot more than others. What you need to do is to compare schools with the same major in order to get more accuracy.
Re: Post #28 above listing salaries. Unfortunately these are not starting salaries:
“The Salary Column is earnings 10 years after entering college, reflecting multiple years of data… These salary & debt data are available only for people who had federal aid…”
Yep I’ve been beating that drum for a long time here and it still doesn’t get through, if you want ROI then MIT/CT in CS or Texas A&M/ Colorado School of mines in petroleum engineering. However try to get the the same money at MIT in Literature (yes that is a major at MIT) and let me know how that goes.
One of the most interesting columns on the WSJ/THE College Rankings is the Default Rate on federal aid.
Tulane & Swarthmore have relatively high rates of default.
Among the top 30 ranked schools, Princeton University has the highest default rate. (Swarthmore College is ranked #31 by the WSJ/THE and Tulane is ranked #56…)
Lit major here (not MIT tho), and there are more of us making surgeon money out there than you might think.
@marvin100 Really, right out of college…my cousin is a Dartmouth English grad and an SVP at Oracle when she retired but your not getting MIT CS money straight out of college as an English major
Impressed by Georgetown’s performance. I imagine a large fraction of the student body ends up on Wall Street.
Babson is also doing remarkably well. Investments in entrepreneurship clearly paying rich dividends…
@CU123 - sure, not right out of college, but the focus on first-year earnings (or first five year earnings) at the exclusion of all else is an asinine distortion that doesn’t reflect much of what happens in real life. There’s no meaningful relationship between starting salary and salary ceiling, afaik.