<p>Are there schools that didn’t provide data? For example, it’s nonsensical to think that Yale is not comparable in ROI to Harvard and Princeton.</p>
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<p>I agree with you. </p>
<p>National rankings primarily exist for bragging rights these days, whereas ROI rankings give a straightforward look at what the real world thinks of your school. I think these lists are pretty accurate actually.</p>
<p>I’d be interested in seeing the ROIs for majors, and not just schools. It is surprising that the ROI for a school full of engineers is higher than the ROI for a school that also has a lot of English majors?</p>
<p>I also feel I have to repeat, for the nth time, the point that income is not the only element of success in many fields. Who is more successful, an English professor at Kenyon, or an accountant in Chicago?</p>
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<p>SOME of your classmates have. These lists represent average ROI’s for the entire student body (or those sampled). Stanford may be a good school, but there are undoubtedly going to be less successful graduates who will drop the ROI average.</p>
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<p>If they had included graduate degrees in the rankings, then some schools would immediately have an unfair advantage (since some schools are research-focused), making the rankings irrelevant. A good number of the schools on the lists are primarily undergrad focused institutions.</p>
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<p>Nope, not overstating, and not just referring to HYP. My D1’s LAC, Haverford, reports that 70% of its graduates go on to graduate programs within five years after graduating. This would include not only Ph.D. programs but a variety of Masters programs as well as medical, law, and business schools, with probably a sprinkling of divinity schools as well. IMO, the concept of ROI based on lifetime earnings with a terminal bachelor’s degree is pretty meaningless at a school where for the overwhelming majority of students, the real “ROI” of a bachelor’s degree is that it gains them admission to graduate school. Yes, many work for one to five years before going on to graduate school, but essentially that’s just an intermediate step in their long-term professional development, giving them some “real world” seasoning and a breather in which they can clarify career goals before they go on to earn the advanced degrees that will define their professional careers–and their lifetime earnings. </p>
<p>It’s no surprise that engineering-heavy schools appear at the top of this list because engineers can have reasonably lucrative careers with a bachelors degree, and most engineers don’t pursue education beyond that point.</p>
<p>[Why</a> Haverford - Office of Admission](<a href=“http://www.haverford.edu/admission/why_haverford/]Why”>http://www.haverford.edu/admission/why_haverford/)</p>
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<p>Not the grad degrees at the school … the grad degrees that undergraduates from a school eventually pursue. One of the issues with this study is there really isn’t a truly fair way to compare … the study would need to correct for undergraduate school, the major, the stats of the student entering college, grad degrees, spousal income (can seriously alter one’s career choices), etc. You mentioned this study calculates the ROI of the whole student body; that is far from true … it only looks at earning of those while at their bachelor level degree … so it has a huge bias against schools that send a higher percentage of students to grad schools.</p>
<p>hmm … cross posted with bclintonk. Of my inner circle of undergraduate friends from Cornell at least 50% have gone onto grad school and I hung out with the relatively unambitious.</p>
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<p>Hunt, the schools don’t report this data. Payscale is based on unverified online self-reporting by individuals self-identifying as graduates of a particular school. This introduces obvious problems of reliability and representativeness. </p>
<p>I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I recall reading that because Michael Jordan was a geography major at North Carolina, geography majors from North Carolina were for a time among the very highest paid, on average, of any major at any school. And even if it’s not true, it could be, given Payscale’s methodology. I’m surprised so many otherwise bright people put as much credence in Payscale as they do.</p>
<p>I think this passes TK21769’s “conventional wisdom” test.</p>
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<p>Strongly agree. So we can hypothesize two options for undergraduate’s decision of a major; (1) choice of a pre-professional subject that will lead to a high-salary job immediately upon graduation; (2) choice of a liberal-arts or basic science that will broadly prepare her/him to live life well in the long run. It is after all a question of preferences of each, IMO. </p>
<p>In this sense (“partial” rather than “whole”), ROI rankings have a limited meaning as do many other rankings.</p>
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“Success” is entirely subjective - which is why college rankings are generally stupid - but I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to rank an objective variable (income) and leave interpretation to the reader.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the PayScale data are flawed. These figures are self-reported and don’t account for grad school attendance or major.</p>
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<p>Both schools’ career surveys indicate that the student’s major is much more important in post-graduation employment prospects.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/majors-that-pay-you-back[/URL]”>http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/majors-that-pay-you-back</a></p>
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You mentioned that at some colleges 80% of graduates pursue advanced degrees. Do you have some examples of colleges where this is true?</p>
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Many of the colleges towards the top of the list have an abnormally large number of students pursuing advanced degrees. According to [REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]REED”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College) , the two colleges that appeared highest on the ROI list (Mudd and Caltech) are the two colleges where the largest percentage of graduates go on to earn PhDs. Caltech is one of the few colleges where the majority of grads pursue advanced degrees, and Mudd isn’t far behind. I don’t see much pattern between percent advanced degrees and ranking on the list.</p>
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I suspect there is great variance in which majors lead to terminal bachelor’s degrees and which lead to graduate study. Even if Caltech sends a lot of people on to advanced study, the ones who don’t go on may be mostly engineers and computer people.</p>
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Comparing the two fictional schools:</p>
<p>At College A , 25% of grads major in tech fields and 75% major in other fields
At College B , 75% of grads major in tech fields and 25% major in other fields</p>
<p>If 50% of non-tech grads earn advanced degrees at 10% of tech grads earn advanced degrees at both schools, then we’d expect college A to have twice the overall advanced degrees rate as college B since it has such a larger percentage of non-tech field graduates. Yet we don’t see this same pattern in the list. Tech-heavy MIT reports a larger percentage immediately pursuing advanced degrees than Harvard or Princeton.</p>
<p>This fits with NCES reported data. The NCES reported that in 2009-10, 7.8% of bachelor’s degrees were in engineering/CS and 8.3% of master’s degrees were in engineering/CS. A larger portion of master’s degrees were in engineering/CS than bachelors, suggesting that are larger portion of engineering/CS majors are pursuing master’s degrees than the overall average across all majors. In contrast the % of master’s and PhDs in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences all decreased tremendously at advanced degrees. For example, 16% of bachelor’s degrees were in social sciences, but only 6% of master’s were in humanities, and only 6% of PhDs.</p>
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But that’s across all colleges, right? Those numbers may be pretty different at the schools we are talking about.</p>
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<p>I recall seeing the 80% figure on the Bryn Mawr website a couple of years ago, but they don’t seem to be reporting data on this anymore. But if Haverford is at 70%, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bryn Mawr is still somewhere in the 70-80% range. Note that these figures also tend to fluctuate somewhat with the economy. When more and better jobs are available straight out of undergrad, grad school enrollment tends to dip.</p>
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<p>First off, you can’t take Ph.D.s as a proxy for advanced degrees. Some undergraduate colleges produce far more MDs, JDs, and MBAs than they do Ph.D.s. At STEM-heavy schools like Caltech and Harvey Mudd, Ph.D.s are probably a larger fraction of the whole.</p>
<p>Second, Caltech and Harvey Mudd are the quintessential engineering-heavy schools. According to its most recent CDS, 44% of Caltech’s grads are engineering majors, and another 12% are in computer science. Most of the rest are in other STEM fields–23% in physical sciences, 10% math, 10% bio. No doubt a high percentage of the Caltech physics, math, and bio majors go on to Ph.D. programs, as do a certain percentage of the engineers and computer scientists. But I’ll bet my bottom dollar that an inordinately high percentage of Caltech grads who don’t go any further than a bachelor’s degree (and therefore are counted in the ROI survey) are engineers and computer scientists. So the ROI survey isn’t telling us you’ll make more money if you go to Caltech, it’s telling us if you go no further than a bachelors degree, you’ll probably make more money if that degree is in engineering or computer science than if it’s in history or English. (Well, doh!)</p>
<p>Figures for Harvey Mudd are pretty similar: 35% engineering, 26% computer science, 18% physical sciences, 14% math, 3% bio.</p>
<p>Contrast Haverford: 0% engineering, 3% computer science. Haverford does have a healthy representation of STEM majors: 10% physical sciences, 11% bio, 5% math, but no doubt a large fraction of these go on to med school or Ph.D. programs and so are not counted in the data on graduates who go no further than a bachelors.</p>
<p>Bottom line, without controlling for majors the ROI data are pretty worthless (even assuming away the underlying problems with Payscale’s methodology). And I’ll repeat what I said earlier: for the vast majority of graduates of a school like Haverford, the real “ROI” of their bachelor’s degree is that it gets them into a graduate program, the nature and outcome of which will shape their trajectory of lifetime earnings. Since that is excluded from the purported “ROI survey,” said survey is pretty much irrelevant to most people attending such schools.</p>
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<p>But note also that STEM majors are not all the same in job prospects. In particular, biology majors tend to do poorly in job prospects.</p>
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<p>Again, you’re conflating Ph.D.s with advanced degrees. These are not even close to the same thing. So 16% of bachelors degrees were in social sciences, but only 6% of Ph.D.s were. That doesn’t tell is now many people with bachelors degrees in social sciences went on to get advanced degrees. A lot of history and political science and economics majors go on to get J.D.s; some, especially econ majors but others as well, get M.B.A.s. Lots of psych majors eventually get M.D.s. All of these get excluded from the “ROI survey.”</p>
<p>And the national percentages across all schools don’t tell you anything about what goes on at any particular school. Even if it’s the case that a large fraction of the political science majors nationally across all schools never get an advanced degree of any kind, that doesn’t mean that’s also true at Yale or Haverford. I’ll bet a much higher percentage of poli sci majors at Yale go on to law school than the national average; and I’m quite certain that of those Yale poli sci majors who do go on to law school, a much higher percentage end up at elite law schools, and more land top-paying jobs.</p>
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<p>Absolutely agree. But at some schools, a high percentage of biology majors go on to medical school. The purported “ROI survey” writes them out of the picture, looking only at the earnings of biology majors who only get Bachelors degrees. Compounding matters, at some schools a large fraction of the biology majors who never get an advanced degree of any kind were actually pre-meds who didn’t get into medical school (or dental school or vet school, which are fallbacks for some).</p>
<p>If, say, 70% of a school’s biology majors are actually pre-meds, and that school gets 70% of its biology-major applicants into medical school, that means roughly half of its biology majors will end up in med school. Another fractional share will end up in Ph.D. programs, perhaps some in Masters programs; some will eventually go to dental school or vet school; a few may find their way to M.B.A. or J.D. programs. Those who end up with a Bachelors as their highest degree are going to include a certain number who either never had a clear career plan, or had a plan but failed to qualify for the advanced degree that would be needed to pursue it. Their earnings may bring down the average for the cohort of those who go no further than a Bachelors degree. But do the lifetime earnings of that group–which at our hypothetical school might be as little as 30% of the biology majors–tell us anything meaningful about the value of an undergrad degree in biology at that school? Not really; not if you’re excluding the most successful biology majors.</p>
<p>It’s a bit different in engineering. In engineering you generally don’t need an advanced degree to have a successful career right out of the gate. It’s true that some engineers go on to get Masters, some even Ph.D.s, and the advanced degrees may bring a bump up in pay. But if you look only at the earnings of people whose highest degree is a Bachelors, engineering is going to look more lucrative than biology, because a higher percentage of the Bachelors-only engineers are going to be in well compensated professional positions in their major field of study. Yet at some schools, the average earnings of all biology majors, including those who go on to get M.D.s or other advanced degrees, might well equal or exceed the average earnings of the engineers. At any rate, it would be interesting to see those comparisons, which we don’t get from this survey.</p>