<p>Do</a> Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com</p>
<p>■■■■■!</p>
<p>The most crucial sentence is just below the rankings: “The data include only survey respondents whose highest academic degree is a bachelor’s. Therefore, doctors, lawyers and others in high-paying jobs that require advanced degrees are not included in the data set.”</p>
<p>That screws the entire thing up! The VAST majority of kids at ANY school in the top 10 (HYPS, Duke, etc.) go on to graduate or professional school. Like a huge percentage. Most Harvard kids (and Duke kids that I personally know) have dreamt of being lawyers, doctors, or businessmen from day one, and a ton of them grow up and do exactly that.</p>
<p>Why do you think incredible liberal arts schools like Williams, Amherst, and Pomona don’t make the list? Because all their kids are in law or med school.</p>
<p>Leaving out J.D.s, MBAs, and M.D.s from this kind of money-related survey is like saying:
“The Charlotte Bobcats are actually a better team than the L.A. Lakers…Well, if Kobe and Gasol aren’t allowed to play.” Absurd.</p>
<p>Hookem is right, that chart makes no sense.</p>
<p>They measure things this way because measuring students who have additional credentials add another layer which cannot be disaggregated and likely has an enormous effect. So no, the listings are far from ideal and have that huge caveat attached, but it’s the only way to measure the effect of one school rather than dealing with multiple schools.</p>
<p>Some of the more obvious troubles are not that they’re not including lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, but that the disparity between concentrations within a school is probably far greater than the disparity between schools meaning that measuring by school alone is not a particularly informative method.</p>
<p>I guess they are trying to measure the “added value” of the bachelor’s degree itself. If someone attends one school as an undergrad and then goes to Law School or Medical School somewhere else, it is difficult to quantify the impact that the undergraduate college properly had on his/her earnings (although I would assume it is probably minimal).</p>
<p>An obvious problem with that survey though is that it doesn’t differentiate earnings per major. Engineering majors for example have higher starting salaries than arts/humanities majors. Accordingly, tech schools like MIT have an (unfair ?) edge on the rankings that is not intrinsically related to the added value of an MIT degree.</p>
<p>lol, Hookem’, I agree. This list doesn’t apply to me personally (since I want to go to med/business school) lol…</p>