Colleges by type still does not fully account for the mix of majors at the college, or (more importantly) the major that an individual student chooses.
If you are looking at financial ROI, the choice of major is likely more important than the choice of college. The link in reply #38 may be of interest. It does look like the top performers do well no matter what their college major background is, but the same cannot be said for the median or lower performers.
Re: #38 and http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
The ratio between the 90th and 10th percentile mid-career pay levels seems to vary considerably, for whatever reason.
1.87 physician assistant
2.07 nursing
2.33 civil engineering
2.42 electrical engineering
2.56 mechanical engineering
2.69 architecture
2.70 chemical engineering
2.75 computer science
2.90 information technology
3.03 industrial engineering
3.18 physics
3.22 management information systems
3.24 religion
3.60 accounting
3.69 biology
3.79 business management
3.81 communications
3.84 sociology
3.98 English
4.01 film
4.02 psychology
4.03 history
4.05 math
4.13 finance
4.15 economics
4.16 marketing
4.34 art history
4.73 philosophy
5.02 music
Of course, the caution with using mid-career pay levels is that these are for people who entered the job market many years ago; the characteristics of the job market today for entry level employees may differ, as can the characteristics of career progression starting now versus years ago.
Also, small (self-reported) sampling sizes have to be taken into account. So I wouldn’t put too much weight on the 90% (or 10%) percentile for art history…
colorado_mom,
Where did you find that data? I was searching for that myself, but was unable to find how many people from each university were included in the ranking.
I’m not sure what you mean “… minor data point in a collection of many factors.” There is only one data point: the salaries of the graduates and a resulting mean.
Are we talking about the same thing?
@purpleTitan
I’d recommend completely ignoring incoming SAT/ACT scores. That number will be a function of the USNews ranking system. Since USNews is the hands-down dominant influence on public opinion of universities, high USNews ranked institutions will draw a higher SAT/ACT population for that reason alone.
High average incoming test scores has nothing to do with the underlying quality or efficacy of the institution and everything to do with High School student’s opinions (and those of their parents) of those institutions.
If anything, I’d think a derating of high incoming SAT/ACT score schools would be in order. These schools would have a distinct advantage in all metrics.
Think about it. Imagine two schools, each with 50% “success” score (however we’re measuring that). One of the schools has extremely high incoming SAT/ACT scores (accepted to indicate higher incoming student potential). The other has mediocre incoming scores. Which school did a better job? Surely they are not the same. The school deprived of high potential students, yet producing a similar number of successful people would be the superior institution, IMHO.
Maikai- your analysis makes a lot of sense, except in the real world which is where the rest of us live.
Ask a professor who has taught a European History class to kids with average 500 SAT verbal scores vs. the same curriculum with kids whose average is 200 points higher. In one class, the kids struggle through the reading; they can handle writing papers which summarize secondary sources but not primary sources, etc. So by the end of the semester, the professor has dumbed down the material (however unwittingly) to match the verbal skills of the class.
Ask a professor teaching organic chem to kids who score in the 700’s on math vs. kids who score in the 500s. The professor can be a magician- but a kid who has average computational and reasoning skills is not going to tackle the material in the same way (as comprehensively, with as much retention and understanding) as a kid with above average skills.
YMMV.
@blossom, it depends on the school culture as well.
Some schools aren’t afraid to flunk kids even if the entering students have varied aptitudes.
Can someone remind me what the stat is called where # of graduates and percentages at each school paying back their loans first year out of college? I thought I had looked it up at some point and that this metric had a name…I can’t seem to remember what it is called though? I failed to bookmark it…
A kid who gets flunked out because he or she was poorly prepared for college level material is not a success story in my book- even if it means that the college who dismissed the kid gets to retain its statistical bragging rights on academic rigor, standards, etc. I know kids (as I’m sure you do as well) who flunk out due to major partying and an inability to knuckle down to college level rigor. That’s different from a kid with weak math aptitude being unable to handle a statistics class geared towards social scientists (i.e. not for applied math majors) or that same kid flunking macro.
I don’t think it should be a point of pride among colleges that they accept kids who cannot do the work at the level most professors are geared to. Entering students have varying work ethics? Yup, and there are consequences. But to knowingly accept kids who don’t have the preparation or the aptitude?
Low selectivity colleges, including open admission community colleges, certainly admit students whose previous records (HS courses/grades/rank and test scores) indicate a lower probability of success than students with better previous records. However, it is often their mission to give late bloomers another chance, rather than having them be shut out completely from going to college after a poor showing in high school. Yes, not all will succeed, but the policy decision that was made (given that many such low selectivity colleges are public ones) was that the successful second-chancers are more beneficial than the failed second-chancers are detrimental. Of course, not everyone on these forums agrees with such policy decisions. (Of course, it may be better for lower cost community colleges, rather than four year schools, to be the entry point for the highest-risk second-chancers, to minimize the costs of failure.)
Note also that a student who has difficulty in college does not always drop out; s/he may change majors or academic goals to something that s/he can succeed in.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-09/college-roi-what-we-found#p1 I can’t see the list from this article but it maybe the same list as Salary Increased by Type of college by Wall Street Journal??
UCB- I applaud open enrollment U’s when they are being candid about their mission. But open enrollment nearly killed off parts of CUNY- at one time, a jewel in the crown of US Higher Ed and a life raft for talented, first gen students. A system the size of CUNY has many options for kids with weak HS prep- you don’t need to take down Baruch or Hunter in order to provide first or second chances for students who need the entry ramps of CC or remedial level work in order to succeed at university level classes.
And you are reinforcing my point that whether you use SAT’s or another standardized test as a proxy for “can this kid handle college level work”, throwing a kid with weak math aptitude, or poor verbal skills, into a classroom with kids who have substantially higher skills and where the professor is teaching to the higher level skills, does not make for a successful college experience.
I think PayScale is largely garbage for many fields because the survey is voluntary. As far as I can tell from their methodology page, they only get salary data when people come to their website and voluntarily take the PayScale survey. They don’t try to recruit representative samples of different fields or get proportionality when it comes to different colleges and universities. People are motivated to join PayScale for different reasons, but I would say that a very significant proportion are visiting PayScale because they are job-hunting…possibly partially because they are unsatisfied with their current salary.
I’d also like to point out that with few exceptions (and excluding the military academies for reasons I’ll get into later), the schools near the top of the list are schools with high(er) proportions of students from high-income earning families - elite privates and some flagship state universities. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and you see more of the regional public campuses and small tuition-driven privates. While I think there are many things that drive starting salaries - including the makeup of the majors at the school, the success of career services, and the perceived value of the students in the university…students from high-income earning families consider and pursue higher-income earning careers. One reason is a lack of familiarity - as a personal example, when I was in high school, I had no idea of what college-educated people did aside from teacher-doctor-lawyer (and later engineer). I had the vague sense that they worked in offices? But I wasn’t familiar enough with jobs that necessitated BAs to think about pursuing specific fields. Kids from high-earning families know many adults who also earn lots of money and are at least somewhat aware of the diversity of things that you can do that will earn you higher salaries out of college.
Another reason is the perception of how much money is necessary. I have a theory that working-class kids are likely to accept salaries in lower-paying fields because they grew up with less, and so the amount sounds like a lot/adequate to them. During most of my childhood and adolescence, my family was working-class to lower-middle-class. So social work salaries or guidance counselor salaries seemed quite satisfactory, because I’d be starting off more making by myself than my entire family’s income was in the middle stages of my parents’ careers. I know that it’s quite possible to live off a total family income of $80K because - ha! - I grew up making a lot less! But if your family makes $200K and you grew up with your family making that much, the idea of starting at $30K and maxing out around $65-70K is…weird, because you don’t really know how to live on less. You’ve never experienced it before.
Also, those from lower income backgrounds may have more pressure to take the first job they get, even though it may not be that well paying or be that good for future career development beyond being a job. Those from higher income backgrounds may be more likely to have post college family support for an extended job search for a better paying or better career development job.
@ucbalumus - Much of the variation can be explained by the commoditization of the field. The fields with low multiples tend to areas that it really does not matter what school one goes to as long as the basic knowledge is learned. That is certainly true for the first five careers on the list. For example, no employer is going to pay a nurse who went to Harvard more than one who went to Directional State University just for the degree. Nursing like the others at the bottom of the list is just a commodity job.
In contrast, the fields at the high end of the scale can be split into two categories, those that are high paying, and those that are prestige based. For the Art History major, when a major art museum is looking for a beginning curator, they will focus on Ivy League or equivalent grads. They will not even consider the Directional State University grad, and these people will end up working at Starbucks. The wide pay differential for these is due to relatively low financial performance at the bottom of the range.
High paying fields, such as finance, economics and film, will by definition have a small number who strike it rich, driving the ratio upward. A mid-career, average finance grad working at a financial institution might make $80,000 to $100,000 per annum. A high performing finance grad at the same age might make $500,000. Some of the other work categories, such as psychology, math and marketing might fall in these categories.
Note that the “commodity” fields are also relatively high paid, at least at the lower end of their ranges, although their higher ends fall below fields like finance and economics. Perhaps this may be that the relative rigor of the majors, enforced by external accreditation and sometimes licensing requirements, means that the weaker students are less likely to complete the majors, unlike in other majors, where there may exist less rigorous major programs where weaker students can graduate with degrees in those majors. Hence, in the former fields, much of the screening is already done before graduation (students who cannot handle the rigor changed out of the majors), while in the latter fields, more of the screening is done in the job market, perhaps with a stronger preference toward prestigious schools and high GPAs as proxies to help find the better potential employees.
Of course, school performance is not the only determinant of career success, as there are many characteristics other than school-related ones (major, college graduated from, GPA) that are big factors in determining career success. For many graduates in majors where the major-specific jobs are few, such characteristics may be the biggest factors in career success in the general job market for bachelor’s degree graduates (i.e. some art history majors who do not get the art museum jobs may be successful in careers of unrelated jobs, while others may be less successful).
Nursing may be a commodity field, but it is a tough career with a high drop out rate. Nurses can be relative well paid, but there is little financial upside to the profession.
@blossom
Not sure what you’re talking about, unless you are very narrowly defining “success” as grades given out by the school, which would be ridiculous.
If you’ve read any of my posts, you’d know I speak of a holistic approach to ranking schools, academic success (as in universally recognized academic awards/achievements/recognition, not just grades given by a particular school) and career success after graduation.
My point was, and still is, the incoming quality of student will have a dramatic influence on those outcomes, therefore, rather than high incoming scores adding to a school’s ranking, those scores should be used to normalize the outcomes so they can be more accurately compared.
Using your own example.
If you take incoming tests as a positive influence on rank, than school ABC is best. But didn’t school XYZ have less to work with, but was able to produce the same results.
All things being equal, I’d send my son… no matter his grades… to school XYZ.
@juillet
“I think PayScale is largely garbage for many fields because the survey is voluntary.
…
People are motivated to join PayScale for different reasons, but I would say that a very significant proportion are visiting PayScale because they are job-hunting…possibly partially because they are unsatisfied with their current salary.”
I don’t agree at all.
I think the survey is useful for the very reason it is a voluntary survey taken for reasons other than to grade their schools. The school ranking is never mentioned in the survey, so few are thinking about bolstering their Alma mater.
Resources like this are used all the time for reasons other than dissatisfaction. I can’t speak knowledgeably about the stats, but I’d assume most were no dissatisfied. I use it regularly to make sure I’m paying my people a competitive salary. I had to put my stats in there before I could pull out others. Most others in my position seem to do the same. That’s where I learned the practice… from others in similar situations.
People all through our company talk about sites like payscale, glassdoor, and other similar sites. Most seem to belong to multiple sites. It only makes sense to keep an eye on what you’re worth.
I don’t work with a population of unsatisfied people. In fact, most have many, many years with the company. I’d ask how these people would even know what they are worth without services like Payscale?