Yes @theloniusmonk From my ds’s alma mater
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/leadership-governance/marillyn-hewson.html
The linked salary survey (https://capd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/about/files/GSS2017.pdf) showed that the maximum salary for any of the responding bachelor’s students exceeded $200k in a single field – “Financial Services” with a list of employers including some Wall Street investment banking companies, such as Goldman Sachs. The median salary for this group was under $100k, but there were a few outliers with $200k salaries. I’d expect those outliers had some kind of quality past work experience.
Some U of Minnesota CS grads were hired by Google, Apple, Amazon and similar desired tech companies. Many highly sought after companies recruit on campus. I’ve previously linked surveys indicating that as a whole employers say they favor flagship grads to “elite” college grads. But yes, many elite wall street IB companies favor recruiting and hiring from prestigious HYPSM… type colleges, rather than flagships. And a small minority of those elite IB hires apparently had $200k+ salaries in the MIT survey.
All I can say is smartasset does not match numbers I see on my end on the returns, etc. We do live in a major metro. Our property taxes are about 10K.
The tool I use has a $1003 allowance for housing for a family of 4. You can barely get a clean one bedroom in a safe area for that. So I tend to think cost of living is estimated low. Renting a modest 3 bedroom would more like $1500-$2500 depending on how far you are willing to drive.
“The median salary for this group was under $100k, but there were a few outliers with $200k salaries. I’d expect those outliers had some kind of quality past work experience.”
Ok that explains a lot, it includes MBAs, and while still high for MBA grads, $200K is more reasonable than for straight out of undergrad CS. You could get to $200K but that would mean typically high tech and valuating your stock at $50-75K on top of your $100-125K a year. Your starting salary is not determined by your school, it’s based on interview, budget etc…
The report showed that 4 majors had reported salaries exceeding 200K plus signing bonus: EE and Computer Science, Computer Science and Engineering, Management, and Math.
I, too, would imagine that these kids had acquired quality past work experience by participating in UROPs and working at internships in the summer.
@theloniusmonk said:
Why would I be shocked? I attended a state flagship for my undergrad and worked with people from elite colleges as well, before I attended an elite for grad school.
I am trying, and apparently failing, to make a subtle point, so I will try again. There is a range of talent at all colleges, from community colleges to the most elite, but the mean talent levels could be different. The mean is very different at a community colleges vs. an elite, and consequently there is little overlap in talent between the two. However, there is a smaller difference between an elite and a respected state university, so there can be a decent amount of overlap.
When a company like Google needs to hire thousands of people each year, they need to recruit far and wide for this talent. Even if they wanted to restrict to the elite, the numbers aren’t there (and it wouldn’t make sense anyway). So they find the employees they need at both Stanford and San Jose State, and MIT and Michigan State.
When a company is more selective and needs a smaller number of highly talented people, they go where the talent is most concentrated, because they can fill their smaller employment needs at the elite colleges, and it is much less work than recruiting everywhere. Therefore a place like Goldman has about 25 colleges where they actively recruit to fill their roughly 300 spots each year. If you go to college outside their recruited colleges, the door is not locked, but it is not wide open because you they don’t recruit at your college, and you are less likely to know existing employees there from your college who can advocate for you and give you advice.
The same is true in the case of extreme math/CS talent, because each of these companies may only need a handful of employees each year, and the people they want are most concentrated in elite colleges. For the most part, Google is not getting those kids, because why would these kids take a job at Google when they can do really interesting work with highly talented people and get paid far more at the same time? But make no mistake, if an IMO Gold Medalist went to Michigan State for financial reasons rather than MIT, the companies in search of elite math talent would be happy to interview him or her as well.
These specific outliers were not MBAs. They were undergrads.
If you look at the breakdown by industry, the few students who had >$200k salaries all worked in a single field – “Financial Services”. The students who graduated with the majors above and did not go in to “Financial Services” did not have any outliers with >$200k+ salaries. It’s not clear to me exactly what this field includes, but it seems to have a wide range of possible salaries, with a median of under $100k, but a few far higher. “Financial Services” employers includes companies like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Merrill Lynch.
@theloniusmonk Page 26 breaks down the salaries for a B.S. degree by major. 4 majors have kids earning 200K+. These kids don’t have masters degrees.
Yes, and those majors’ median and mean pay levels for bachelor’s graduates are nowhere near $200k, so the $200k ones are outliers.
As a comparison, similar salary surveys for Princeton and Yale are below:
Princeton – https://careerservices.princeton.edu/sites/career/files/Annual%20Report%202016-17_web%20%281%29_0.pdf – No salaries above $200k in any fields. Computer/math had highest average salary, but some had higher maximums than the computer/math maximum of $150k.
Yale – https://ocs.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/OCS%20Stats%20pages/Final%20Class%20of%202017%20Report%20(6%20months).pdf – 91% of grads have salaries under $90k, >99% have salaries under $150k, highest is ~$200k, like Princeton.
While MIT may have had a small minority of “financial services” grads with $200k salaries, they do not seem to appear in the Princeton or Yale surveys. This type of job appears to be such an extreme outlier that I’d expect there are almost always special circumstances relating to the position. For students, I’d suggest emphasizing career outcomes for the vast majority, not what happens for that one “financial services” hire who has double the usual starting salary due to special past experience, special connections, or inaccuracies related to self-reporting.
Does anyone value the actual education and experience one receives for 4 years at an elite college or are you just concerned about the starting salary upon graduation? IMO, the value of the education is just as important as the starting salary as the undergrad experience and connections (alum and to the college) stay with you for the rest of your life. For example, my cousin and his wife went to Stanford in the 80’s and are still heavily involved in their college, conducting applicant interviews, annual alumni events, hiring local grads, cardinal football games and other D1 sports, they even live near campus. In summary, their 4 years at S has stayed with them (has become a part of them) for the past 35 plus years. Contrast that to my alma mater, UC Davis, much more impersonal (large student body) with limited alumni connections, lack of real school spirit, and quaint but boring small town, where no one stays after graduation. I probably have a combined family income greater than my cousins (only one spouse works) but the college experience is night and day from these two colleges. Sure they could have attended UC Davis like me (and saved a lot of money) but the opportunities are not equal.
I’m certain $200k+ is not the base salary for a new grad. It likely includes either a signing bonus or a guaranteed year-end bonus for the first year.
@socaldad2002 I tried to make that point upthread, but it falls on deaf ears. I see it kind of like buying an expensive car. On my street, where people probably earn about what we do, if not less, there are some who own mercedes and BMWs. We have a Subaru. Just isn’t important to us. But sending our kids to “special” undergrad schools (despite the constant refrain of some here “Where you go for UG doesn’t matter”) was important to US. I went to Swarthmore as your typical suburban kid. I’m quite sure if I’d gone to a big state school I still would have majored in Engineering, probably would still have gone on to grad school in Engineering, as I did. But I likely would have attended a lot more football games, a lot more beer parties, and a lot fewer intellectual, artistic, and politically engaging events.
I say that because I know who I was at that age, and what I was interested in (I like beer!) – my college classmates brought out, and emphasized those interests (not to mention that a serious lack of football games and beer parties reinforced it!) I’m glad for all that. This is not to say that someone who goes into college interested in politics, or art, or philosophy, can’t find that lots of places. It’s just that I know I wouldn’t have bothered to look at age 18.
@socaldad2002 @donnaleighg I went to a top 20 school that had 8K undergrad. There is definitely an aspect of my education that I value that doesn’t immediately translate into dollars. It made me a more well rounded individual. I can appreciate that and feel quite lucky that was able to attend the school when half of sticker price would have totally been out of reach for my family. I was a need based student, but still had loans. Heck I found my better half there as well.
Ironically I had a full-ride at my state flagship and choose the other school. If my D19 was in my same situation I would tell her to do what I did. She won’t be because I make too much money. Loans she would most likely have to take out be around $80-100K. We have money saved but that would most likely be the shortfall. I would have hard time letting her do that. If in comparison her loan number at a state school or LAC could be $5-10K.
See my wife and I came out of UG with around $60-65K in loans. That was a long time ago so that was a big number. We spent most of our 20s living on the cheap paying that off. I want something better for my D19 so she doesn’t have to go through that. I will say in the end I don’t regret too much about my decision, but like I just said I want something better for my kids. I think we all do.
$60,000 from 30 years ago is equivalent to $126,430.22 adjusting for CPI inflation, according to https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60000&year1=198809&year2=201809 .
@gpo613 I totally get where you’re coming from. We were fortunate, saved a ton, and had a not-insignificant amount gifted from a generous grandparent. No loans for the kids. I was more responding to someone upthread who said “No school anywhere is worth $250k for an undergrad.” That’s the kind of comment that I just have to push back on. And along with @socaldad2002, all this emphasis on whether a bean counter will say that the money spent is “worth it” based on financial ROI. In that case lots of things are never “worth it.” But people spend money on them anyway. To each his or her own.
Wife and I were fortunate in graduating from state flagships with a handful of engineering degrees debt free. As we planned our future with children we knew two things: our kids would not quality for needs based FA, and we also did not want them saddled with debt. So we invested wisely in 529’s (as did grandparents). Seventeen years later as our S was applying to colleges our message to him was to apply to where he though he could learn the most. It’s hard to put a value on a school. Is $250k too much? I don’t know, but it was not an issue in our particular case. Do I think it’s money well spent? Yes, actually I do.
People spend money on all sorts of things. I drive the worst car out of any of my colleagues. The one who is always complaining about money just traded up to a new BMW when her lease was up. People take cruises, buy their kids cars for their 17th birthday, wear sneakers which cost crazy amounts of money, upgrade their phones the second a new one comes out and brag that they are now spending more money on cellphone/data plans than their parents pay for a mortgage.
What does it mean for something to be “worth it”? My neighbor who told her kids “you can join the army and pay your way through the GI bill, or commute to the local branch of the state college system” because she wouldn’t sell the ski condo or the beach house? To her, it wasn’t worth it. To me it was worth every penny but with a few caveats- my kids took full advantage of their college experiences (and not just academic- going to political debates when heads of state showed up on campus; gallery openings, music premiers of a friends concerto) so I never felt I was subsidizing a four year beer pong; I stayed in the work force full time once I had kids so having two incomes gave us financial choices that a one income or limited income family just doesn’t have; I had kids young so that once we were done paying for college we still had lots of years to save for retirement. And my health- thank god. No divorce- more gratitude.
Everyone’s circumstances are different, but boy, even the posters who say “no college education is worth X” whatever X is- I bet you spend money on something that your friends or parents or siblings think “wow, who would pay for that?”
The thing that bothers me about the focus on elites is the implicit idea that four years at a “top tier” educational institution is something that is required for success. The corollary, that an elite education is a guarantee of success is equally false.
We’ve all read the predictions about how hard it will be for our children to maintain the economic resources necessary to maintain the lifestyles they have been brought up in. And, the increase in the cost of an elite education (and college education in general) reflects the willingness to “invest” substantial savings or go into debt to assure our children a good start in life. It’s this search for surety for our kids’ futures that I feel has fueled the applications arms race of recent years and reified the tiers and rankings into something that doesn’t really reflect reality across the board. Despite differences in starting pay or increased likelihood of becoming a Supreme Court Justice or the next tech billionaire, the fact is that most of the people who go to elite colleges will likely wind up in the same upper-middle-class lives that they would have if they had gone to their state flagships. Success (and failure) in life is most often the accumulation of many decisions and ongoing effort throughout life rather than something that can be attributed to four years spent at one kind of college vs. another.
Instead, I see it as others have explained it, a discretionary purchase and one that telegraphs to the world something about what a family values and is willing to spend money on. Which is why the experiential arguments for elite education make more sense to me than the outcome arguments.
However, cynic that I am, I do wonder if the out-of-proportion increases in tuition combined with the ever-dwindling acceptance numbers are key to maintaining the perceived value of an “elite” education as a badge of intellectual worthiness and/or a modern version of conspicuous consumption.