Re post #11. Check the numbers of elite school grads who only get a bachelors degree. Many top public U’s likely have higher numbers going on to grad schools (can’t do percentages because those schools serve more than one tier of student). Check the educational credentials of faculty and grad school students at the elite schools. Many lesser schools, especially for undergrads going on to more elite schools.
The cost of living for an area needs to be considered. Do those who went to tippy top schools make more in the same city??? There is life (and a good one) outside of the east coast corridor.
For physicians- Harvard undergrads can go to other medical schools and Harvard medical grads have ended up in the same middle sized city as those from the state schools.
Another factor- regions. Hard for some on the east coast to believe, but there are many who never intend to live there. Many stay within their regions. It may matter more to the many who are competing for jobs in the densely populated east.
“Employers may not actually believe that stocking the staff with a lot of graduates from elite schools will directly pay-off in more and better products with resultant higher revenue, but that won’t necessarily stop them from valuing, or perhaps over-valuing, elite education just the same. They like to brag to themselves and to others about the high quality of their employees, and having graduates from elite schools can be seen as evidence of that. It’s not hard to see how that can open up more career opportunities for graduates from those elite schools”
Employers are not a huge monolith. Employers are people, and some people value / prize elite schools and others don’t.
As well, the specific schools that are desirable vary from region to region. It’s been said on this board that if you want a job in Dallas, UT or SMU may get you further than Princeton or Brown. I know of circles where Notre Dane trumps pretty much everything. Don’t make the provincial mistake that money, success, and good careers are found exclusively in I-banking in the NE or technology in the Silicon Valley. I get embarrassed for people who pride themselves on their sophistication yet don’t see a world outside Wall St and the SV - what’s the point of being sophisticated if you’re not expansive in your thinking?
Another difference between the upper tier and the other schools that the study may not show is the gap between graduation and being hired for that first job. What additional schooling and expense did the graduate have to incur? In finance, my kids noticed that the elite school grads could get hired for positions with their bachelor’s, for which state school grads first needed an MBA. So yes, they may end up at the same job, but the guy from the lower tier school had to spend 2 extra years and some cash to get there. Similarly, D’s Stanford CS grads were snatched up immediately, whereas her high school friends who went to schools like TCNJ for CS needed to get a master’s degree or had to take extra classes before they could get a job in IT.
" For example, many of the doctors from a school aren’t in the math yet…but in 10 years the amounts will have significantly adjusted. "
-MD’s should not be included in this discussion at all. First, nobody cares what UG the MD graduated from (including the medical schools when applying to them). Second, most residency places end up with the mixture of applicants from various medical schools. Another point is that the selective residencies care about the scores, grades, research and invite to courtesy interview if applicant rotated there. And at the end, hospital / clinic will have a mixture of the MDs, while Harvard graduate will work in the same office as state public medical school graduate and the Harvard medical school graduate may not be a better doctor there at all. When I asked around about specific doc., it does not even occur to me (or anybody that I ever heard) to ask what medical school the MD attended. Anyway, they all participate with certain insurance and they have to accept their rates.
Good point @MiamiDAP. Insurance companies do not pay more regardless of undergrad, medical school or residency. It is a negotiation and your affiliation or employment with a health care system is more a determinant of those rates than anything else. Medicare and Medicaid pay a fee schedule that is fixed for everyone in a geographic area. Doctors who came out of elite schools don’t have much advantage in pay as far as payers are concerned.
TCNJ is not in the same CS-job-rich region as Stanford. Perhaps a better comparison would be San Jose State, a non-elite university which is in the same region as Stanford. It does look like San Jose State graduates in computer science, computer engineering, and software engineering do reasonably well: http://www.sjsu.edu/careercenter/employers/salary-data/2014SalarySurveyReportFinal.pdf .
I doubt the majority of state school grads in computer science are having to go to graduate school or take extra classes just to get a job. Even Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia, nowhere near SV or Seattle is sending plenty of kids to places like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, etc. right out of undergrad. Their post grad survey says they had one kid that graduated in 2015 go to Google in Mountain View (only about 60% report so may or may not be only one) . But, surprise-not everyone cares about needing to work at a place like Google or wants to relocate to places like the SV or Seattle. Here is Virginia Tech’s Post Grad survey, click on 2014-2015 survey and you can see the list of all employers by major. Look under Details, then List of all employers, job titles,and locations. Kids are getting computer science jobs all over the country. That is probably typical of any good state school’s computer science program. http://www.career.vt.edu/PostGraduationSurveyReport/PostGrad.html
Well, some of those lists of employers don’t tell you when after graduation the students got the job. I see on the TCNJ list the companies that two of her friends now work at, and both needed more classes after graduation.
Also, wouldn’t VA Tech be elite by the parameters of the survey?
"wouldn’t Virginia Tech be elite by the parameters of the survey " Well, no, it is still a state school. If you look at finance (which you also mentioned), lots of those kids seem to have gotten jobs without having to get an MBA first. Only one listed going to Goldman Sachs (I’m sure Penn has tons), but kids clearly getting offers from very respectable employers. You would probably find similar outcomes at many “state schools.”
The data is so flawed it can tell you very little except that folks in America love debating rankings and trying to figure out how their special snowflake can beat the odds- or get a “sure thing” which absolutely does not exist in the career market.
All the kids who four years ago got shoved in Petroleum Engineering by their parents so they’d be making 80K coming out of undergrad… how’s that working now?
Don’t go to U Penn or Stanford if you think that by going there you will never have to worry about developing marketable skills- or that the skills which might serve you well in your 20’s will be the same skills you’ll need in your 30’s. Don’t go to Southern CT State to save your money for grad school if you are interested in bulge bracket banking in a front office function (although why a 17 year old thinks that way I can’t fathom) because you will surely need to buck the odds on that bet. Don’t go to U Conn to major in Leisure Studies if you really, really want to study European History at Yale and can actually get admitted to Yale and can afford to go to Yale- your employment prospects- all things being equal- are better with a degree in history from Yale than Leisure Studies from U Conn.
See how complicated it all is?
At virtually every large corporation in America there will be a VP or SVP who started as an administrative assistant and didn’t go to college. So talking about “I know the head of Labor Relations at blah-blah and she didn’t even go to undergrad, let alone law school” doesn’t in any way help a young kid in the year 2016. Who absolutely needs a BA and then likely a law degree or MBA or related in order to head up labor relations at a Fortune 50 corporation.
The talent market is dynamic and global and even looking at a recruiting calendar from 2007 (which companies recruit at which colleges) is terribly misleading. Things change. Disciplines change. Headcount changes. The number of companies moving core functions (not just call centers- but things like procurement and legal and finance/tax) to low cost locales- Warsaw, Costa Rica, to name two places that most people don’t realize are on a hiring binge for corporate talent would make your head spin. If a company has its server farm overseas, the IT talent moves next. Before you know it, the entire tax team is now sitting in an office park down the street. These were people making $100K with good benefits in St. Louis or Dayton or Tulsa.
Tell your kids to work hard in college. Learn to write really well. Learn to analyze and process information quickly. Become proficient at something. Prove to employers that you can self-teach and can work in a team and can learn new things and can make connections between a recession in China and the cost of a microwave oven in the UK.
Telling them “Just go to ABC college because a survey says that you won’t make anymore money if we pay for elite U” is incomplete advice. And is based on very bad numbers if this survey is any indication.
No, sevmom. These schools were included in the “top category” for the purposes of the research:
Indiana University-Bloomington
Suny at Albany
The University of Texas at Austin
University of California-Berkeley
University of Colorado at Boulder
Therefore, I contend VATech would be in the top group.
Of course, a “sure thing” does not exist, regardless of where a kid goes to school-whether that is an elite private or state school. That is obvious. You can look at a survey and take what you want from it. If you find any of the surveys coming out of any colleges to be flawed and full of bad data, then disregard.
TheGFG, I haven’t looked at the whole survey, just mostly where the grads are going. And they are going to all kinds of employers , typical of many schools. Others going to graduate school, of course. Blossom seems to think these kinds of surveys are very flawed but they seem to be here to stay. I haven’t looked in a while, but I know elite privates like Penn also have a pretty detailed post grad survey
I always feel the need in such conversations to point out that there are some fields in which salary is not the primary measure of “success.” It may not be the primary measure of satisfaction, either.
“I always feel the need” Of course that is true. . Even in some high paying fields, the salary may not be the main measure of success or satisfaction. . Some fields just happen to have higher salaries, in general, than others.
Deferred comp is rarely captured accurately in salary surveys. So early Facebook or Microsoft employees who might have been making $65K in cash but who became multimillionaires by the age of 30 get pushed into the 50-65K tranche along with the supply chain manager for the State of Maine who reviews contracts for salt and sand for the department of public works.
See how messy the data is?
Which is why I’ve said (sounding like a broken record) a parent is better off investing time in learning how labor markets operate vs. trying to parse the difference between the salary prospects of an accounting major at Bentley vs. the accounting major at UT. Reading these surveys don’t help you.
I have counseled DOZENS of kids who have not made one visit- not one visit- to their college’s career center in their four years. These are often the children of parents who anxiously read the salary surveys and are convinced that Direct admission to Indiana is the ticket to success vs. having to apply to get into Ross because a survey shows a marginally higher starting salary from one vs. the other.
While it may be true (but likely not- the numbers are self-reported and just ask any middle aged woman if she actually is the weight she’s got listed on her driver’s license if you want a quick lesson on self-reporting and accuracy) it doesn’t mean anything FOR YOUR KID. If your kid doesn’t participate in the video interviewing and the mock case interview sessions or won’t allow a professional to proof read his/her cover letter, the salary differentials are meaningless.
Parents ask me to help their kids launch. I am generally happy to help. I end up with a kid sitting in my office or living room or on the phone explaining the 42 reasons why he or she doesn’t have a job even though it’s October and graduation was in May.
Maybe help your kid avoid THAT? vs. trying to figure out if Santa Clara has a better alumni network than SMU (better for what? Both colleges have rabid alumni networks in my experience but that’s a dumb reason to pick a college.)
However, there may be increasing pressure on people to chase the money due to having substantial student loan debt (particular for those who go to medical or law school).
There may also be the phenomenon where someone who grew up in a high SES environment (e.g. the no-financial-aid “middle class”) chases the money because s/he has difficulty imagining living on a what middle income actually is in the US.
Well, considering that they posted a similar recruitment ad on a billboard along Highway 101 in California back a few years ago, I don’t know that they’re being quite that targeted with their efforts.
" Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries?
Who cares? "
-People who need to pay off their student loans that could have been avoided if they attended in-state publics on Merit scholarships, they care A LOT. Believe me! That is what D. said about her medical school classmates right before graduation. All of a sudden they faced the re-payment schedule while not being paid high at all during the residency, which may last for 4 - 7 years. And then they have families, houses,…etc. No wonder that some of these loans are not re-paid into the advanced age.
Of course, not everybody cares. You are right!. There are families with unlimited resources. But thinking about it, they never had loans to begin with, why would they care about loans that they did not have? These people will not care, the rest of us would. So, financial planning should be a part of everybody’s decision making, unless they have unlimited resource or have no plans to repay student loans.
“There may also be the phenomenon where someone who grew up in a high SES environment (e.g. the no-financial-aid “middle class”) chases the money because s/he has difficulty imagining living on a what middle income actually is in the US.”
You’ve perseverated on this, but it’s not that they have “difficulty imagining living on it.” They can imagine it just fine, but they are young, and immature, and don’t get the natural first stage in life of saving your pennies and living in a cruddy apartment with your parents’ hand-me-downs and having to choose between going to dinner and going to the movies.
If you look at finance (which you also mentioned), lots of those kids seem to have gotten jobs without having to get an MBA first. Only one listed going to Goldman Sachs (I’m sure Penn has tons), but kids clearly getting offers from very respectable employers. You would probably find similar outcomes at many “state schools.”