Not sure this completely works with the Payscale list… Harvey Mudd, which tops the list, also has among the colleges with the highest percentage of students going on to grad school as well.
"Not sure this completely works with the Payscale list… Harvey Mudd, which tops the list, also has among the colleges with the highest percentage of students going on to grad school as well. "
Well some school with virtually no liberal arts majors, whose grads all gravitate to the coasts for employment , is going to wind up #1. It might as well be Harvey Mudd.
What is the proportion of majors in Art, English, Humanities and Social sciences that graduate from Harvey Mudd?
What proportion of Harvey Mudd graduates wind up working in the heartland?
Besides, Harvey Mudd is a teeny school. Many other schools may well have greater discrepancies between their strongest vs. weakest graduates than Mudd has. That does not make Mudd the template for drawing conclusions about this generally, but rather more an exception IMO.
Not sure of the percentages, but certainly there are Mudders who don’t stay on the West Coast. In any case, it may be an exception in some ways, but it is a great school for STEM students, and students likely will do fairly well financially if they go there.
HMC’s CDS indicate that its bachelor’s degrees are 37% engineering and 26% CS, but only 11% biology and under 3% H/SS.
Did you check article by The College Solution website “The College Where PhD’s get their start” It shows undergraduate origins of PhDs Percentage Ranking of PhD’s by Academic Field. Conferred upon Graduate of listed institutions like History, Life Science, Math/Statics, Physical Science, Anthropology, Chemistry, Physics, Social Sciences, English/Literature and Humanities. I think it is very interesting article.
Do you have a link to the article? Not easy to find if you just go to the website.
Sorry I can’t copy and paste this website somehow…Article was posted by Lynn O’Shaughnessy on Jun 26, 2012.
Let see I will try to copy and paste this website http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/ O.K. please check.
Looks like they just copied the chart from Reed’s web site, complete with Reed in boldface.
Yep…
I’m not sure if I believe that’s the case. Do PhD programs prefer someone from Reed over someone from UT-Austin? Or is it just more likely that the type of students that attend elite LAC’s, tend to apply to PhD programs? Of course, a great education helps your chances, but I think it’s more the student than the school.
“If a school is supposedly “better” than others, as the its ranking implies, then the population with bachelors from that school should do better than a population of bachelors from another. What’s wrong with that logic?”
What’s “wrong” with that logic is that you may be comparing schools that have just liberal arts and engineering to schools that have other schools, such as theatre or music, where entry salaries are a lot lower. Everyone KNOWS engineers make more off the starting gate. I’m not really convinced, personally, they make more over the long run.
“everyone” knows that bio majors make more money than philosophy majors. “everyone” knows that majoring in business is better than majoring in history. Surely a 2.5 GPA in marketing trumps a 3.8 in political science.
Eeesh. All of these reports have logical inconsistencies, problems with the data, poor sample sizes, AND then end up just reinforcing biases which may or may not be true.
I know you guys find it hard to believe but there are unemployed engineers out there in the real world. I know you find it hard to believe but there are literature majors who get fantastic jobs right out of college (no grad school) and end up out-earning the international business majors.
There are some colleges that do a fantastic job with their career services, and there are some kids at these colleges who refuse to avail themselves of the services that are there (and for which they are already paying.) There are colleges with outdated recruiting/career advising departments and even still- some kids manage to snag fantastic jobs during senior year due to their own initiative and networking. There are kids who haven’t made a resume by May of Senior year, and seem shocked that half their classmates accepted jobs back in January (or September if they got an offer after their summer job).
If you are looking to these surveys to tell you whether you’re going to have a kid who works hard to get launched (and therefore will likely find a job) or a kid who shuffles home after graduating to take up residence with your remote control, then guess what- they won’t.
I advise kids all the time whose parents can’t understand why a finance graduate from XYZ college can’t get a job in finance. Guess what- the kid hates finance. And it shows during an interview. I advise kids who don’t understand why their undergraduate degree in real estate isn’t opening up doors at the big REIT’s and hotel/commercial development companies, and are shocked when they see that those companies hire math majors and econ majors and history majors who know NOTHING about real estate. But momma didn’t want the kid majoring in math or history- not practical enough.
I am now working with a very nice new grad (graduated in December) who is beyond clueless. Kid tells me he wants to work at X company doing Y. I say great- happy to help. The head of recruiting is a former colleague of mine and I’m happy to make a phone call- which division is he most interested in so I can make sure his resume lands on the right desk- kid looks at me vacantly, and I realize kid has no idea what the company does. Not a clue. I am meeting this kid as a favor to his family- and to pay it forward- and the kid, who is a college graduate from a decent undergrad business program, doesn’t have the sense to prepare for the meeting with a three minute Google and a speed read of the company’s annual report.
The time and attention paid to these dubious surveys you guys love to cite could really be spent studying the labor markets for new grads. A much better investment of your time. Learn who hires what and why. Learn how a kid with a degree in 19th century literature got a job as a marketing assistant at a global consumer products company, while your kid with a degree in global marketing is struggling to get interviews. Figure out why the market for new grads in Charlotte operates somewhat differently than the market in San Francisco.
THIS will help your kid. Not some survey based on a sample size of 8 self-reported new grads.
Well, using Payscale (with all the caveats that go with that…)
Highest paying jobs for those with a bachelor’s degree:
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/majors-that-pay-you-back/bachelors
You can view early and mid-career numbers.
Highest paying jobs with a graduate degree.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/majors-that-pay-you-back/graduate-degrees
It’s dominated with STEM and MBA degrees. Hmm…perhaps I need to tell my DD to think about getting an MBA 
An MBA from a top school will help. An MBA from an online program or one with loose admissions criteria won’t. It won’t help and it costs time and money.
Don’t kid yourself that employers don’t know the difference. You can have be graduating with honors from business school and the second question during your interview will still be “What was your GMAT score”.
Not sure how helpful these statistics are…
“Everyone” seems to believe that, but most of the evidence seems to indicate that it is not true. Biology graduates are very common, so the biology-specific job market is flooded with applicants. Biology majors should be willing to seek general bachelor’s degree jobs, like many H/SS majors.
In general, any given major may have good or poor major-specific job prospects (and this may vary depending on economic and industry cycles). If one’s major-specific job prospects are poor, then one has to seek a job in the more general job market for bachelor’s degree graduates.
hehe…right after blossom’s well written tirade against surveys, I posted a link to more surveys…timing is everything
Guess I’ll not put up the stats on Harvey Mudd graduates…where they live and what they are doing ;
Sorry to jump into an otherwise fascinating discussion with an off-topic comment, but I’d like to address this question specifically.
As a Reed student currently applying to graduate school, I have to say I’m becoming increasingly convinced there’s some truth to the myth that Reed has a strong reputation among grad schools and it helps its students get in. In particular, I think graduate schools are willing to give Reed students with mediocre GPAs the benefit of the doubt and don’t seem to care too much if Reedies don’t have many awards and presentations. I also think our professors are simply very good at getting students into grad school; the advice I’ve received on my school choices, statements of purpose and other application materials has been very insider-y and more specific and valuable than the generic advice you can find on the internet, even on the best resource websites.
Overall, I think Reed students fare better in the application process than non-Reedies with similar credentials, based on my perusal of a bunch of grad school admission forums and my knowledge of other Reed students’ academic profiles/application results, and that is especially true in certain disciplines and at certain schools. For example, UChicago seems to absolutely love Reed graduates. It’s known as the school everyone applies to and almost everyone gets into, in all disciplines but particularly in the social sciences, math and German.
Finally, while it is of course true that people go to graduate school because they want to rather than because of their undergraduate alma mater, Reed’s institutional culture predisposes students to consider grad school, even if they didn’t feel very strongly about it initially.
All this is to say, based on my personal observations I’d say you’re underestimating the effect of going to a college that prioritizes grad school outcomes like Reed does.
@Pizzagirl:
More info based off of survey data:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
Mid-career, the 75th percentile of philosophy majors earn the same as the 75th percentile of aerospace engineering majors, but the 25th percentile of philosophy majors earn far less than the 25th percentile of aerospace engineering majors.
Mid-career, the 90th percentile of philosophy and poli sci majors actually earn more than the 90th percentile of MechE, CompE, and Aerospace majors (the 10th percentile of the former2 majors do far worse than the 10th percentile of the engineering majors, of course).
Some reasons for that, I’m going to hypothesize:
The engineering majors do prepare you for a profession, so a higher floor is understandable.
Furthermore, ABET engineering programs will all have a certain amount of rigor, requiring a certain amount of smarts/work ethic, while the rigor of liberal arts is much more variable (varying not only by college but even by department within the same college).
The 90th percentile of even the lowest ranked majors (by 90th percentile mid-career earnings) is still higher than the median income from all but 6 majors.
The lesson to draw, IMO, is that you should (as Mark Cuban says) follow your work. If you have the talent and willingness to work hard to excel in a field, you’ll do well, regardless of the field you’re in. There was one CEO, I can’t remember the name, but he was a liberal arts major, and during an interview, he said something to the effect of, “I realized that I could become successful in any field I chose, so long as I was in the top 10% of that field, and that was a very liberating feeling”.
However, I would still encourage picking up liberal arts skills. Not only writing well, but also the ability to understand and make logical and quantitative arguments.
That is great information website. We can check Salaries by Region and Salaries for college by Type, too. We also need to know current job market. Yes salaries suppose to go up and hopefully you can keep that job. As are parents we contribute child’s educations but we really worry about ROI since lots of money are involve. Hopefully high education bubble will not occur in their future. I also referred College education ROI rankings: Does a Degree Always Pay Off? by http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/college-roi-2013/school-by-type