UChicago has changed a lot since the people whose tax returns are being analyzed attended. So a lot of this data may not be quite as relevant to UChicago now as other school’s are. Still, it’s quite enlightening.
UChicago seems like the most economically diverse but also the worst school to be a poor student in.
Still, the relatively bad student outcomes may be partially explained by the choice of career - UChicago’s academically minded graduates going to grad school/law school/med school instead of pursuing high paying careers by the age of 34 like engineering (not an option) or finance (UChicago students choose at much lower rates than peers) will have affected outcomes significantly. Looking at which schools ended up where in the “income at age 34” hierarchy, this theory seems pretty solid.
Our mobility index ended up not to shabby, only beaten by Cornell and MIT with their formidable engineering schools.
Among elite schools, there is an almost direct inverse correlation between average financial outcomes and how academic (versus preprofessional) the school is.
UChicago (and other places like Yale and Swarthmore and Reed) always have a lower average financial outcome than, say, UPenn (and other pre-professional or business heavy colleges like Duke, Georgetown, Washington & Lee and Colgate) because so many more UChicago students choose to go for PhDs while so many more UPenn students go into business.
There is nothing wrong with either approach for an individual student, but if you are ranking schools based on that, you are getting a skewed result. This is the biggest problem with the Forbes and Economist rankings (although the Economist rankings have a lot of other problems as well).
For the outcome trends the data has been harvested with the class of 1980-2 who would be turning 34-35 this year. Given how the status of the college back then compares to the status today, both in relative and absolute terms, I believe the graphs will look much better in early 2030s! I would be careful in dismissing the college’s relatively poor performance here because of student preferences though; I think the reality is that the college of the 80s probably wasn’t well regarded to employers or prospective students. It took a certain breed of student back to weather the environment back then, a breed perhaps less suited to entering the 1%.
Silly – that’s birth year 1980-1982, not college entry or college graduation. Those people started college in the late '90s or early 2000s. That’s still a significant difference compared to today in terms of who composed the student body, but I know several people from that cohort who went there – among other things, I taught a one-quarter literature class to 12th graders in 1999, three of whom wound up going to Chicago – and they were (and are) impressive. It was something of a secret clubhouse for very intellectual kids with slightly flawed resumes who preferred it to being in the boonies in Ithaca or Hanover, or who came from and didn’t want to leave the Midwest. The Chicago name had plenty of power with sophisticated people then, too. And the various changes that have made it a more attractive, student-centered undergraduate institution were well underway.
For what it’s worth, my Chicago alum kids, now 30 and 27, both with classically undercompensated majors and neither working in a lucrative field, are way ahead of the median salary for 34-year-olds in that study.
@Trickster2212 you said “I would be careful in dismissing the college’s relatively poor performance here because of student preferences though; I think the reality is that the college of the 80s probably wasn’t well regarded to employers or prospective students.”
I agree with regard to prospective students, but I disagree with regard to employers and especially with regards to grad schools. It was understood by employers and grad schools that Chicago was a meatgrinder, and the ones who made it out to graduation were very well regarded. I was accepted to multiple top 10 law schools despite having an undergraduate GPA that was far below the average for all of those schools. My roommate was accepted to multiple top medical schools in the same way.
The biggest problem was that the career services office was basically non-existent. You had to find the opportunities yourself - but if you did find them and apply, your degree was very well regarded.