Has no one started a thread on this one yet? http://www3.forbes.com/leadership/colleges-with-highest-salaries-after-graduation/26/
You sent us to the last page with no where to go (i.e. no “previous” button)…
For others use this link to get to the start: http://www3.forbes.com/leadership/colleges-with-highest-salaries-after-graduation/
Woo Hoo! Love #2 ! — though 1 and 2 aren’t much of a surprise since they are all STEM majors.
The Forbes site is so awful and spam filled, not sure how they get people to go there.
As an act of kindness to my fellow CC’rs - I’ve copied and pasted the list so you wouldn’t have to wade through the spam to get to it (one slide at a time)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2: Harvey Mudd College 3: Stanford University 4: Harvard University 5: Washington and Lee University
- Stevens Institute of Technology 7: California Institute of Technology 8: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 9: Georgetown University 10: Tufts University 11: University of Pennsylvania 12: Princeton University 13: Worcester Polytechnic Institute 14: Colgate University 15: Georgia Institute of Technology 16: Duke University 17: Carnegie Mellon University 18: Lehigh University 19: Colorado School of Mines 20: Cornell University 21: Yale University 22: Rice University 23: Santa Clara University 24: Clarkson University 25: University of Notre Dame
The list is actually useless. Some salaries are listed as after-graduation and some as mid-career earnings. Not clear where the numbers came from. Cannot believe that Yale students have 90K+ average starting salary after graduation.
But photos are OK.
Edit: The first page says mid-career, title says after graduation, slides have both.
Clearly a winning material.
No surprise that several of the top schools (1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 19) are engineering or CS heavy. Some others (4, 5, 11, 12) are fast track to Wall Street schools.
You also need to know where the graduates are. I would expect someone from, say MIT or Harvard to have high salaries because the graduates are more than likely settling in high-income areas - and also have a high cost of living. But, No. 22 Rice is in Houston, one of the country’s largest cities and yet one of the most affordable, and I would imagine their graduates are more likely to stay in Texas or one of the neighboring states, all of which have lower costs of living.
Sorry for the wrong link to the page.
Its pretty apparent several of the schools generate a lot of tech grads, and others probably sending to top IB type firms. And yes, while some are in less expensive cities, some of the grads will end up in , say, Silicon Valley, where the salaries (and COL) are higher.
Adblocker Plus user here. What spam @suzyQ7 ? But thank you for the list, I hate clicking through slideshows.
Also, if this is the same data as other earnings-related surveys, either (a) It is limited to people who never got any sort of graduate degree. Which, for many non-technical colleges, renders it almost random. Among people I knew at my college, the only people who didn’t have a post-baccalaureate degree 10 years out were a few journalists, artists of various sorts (writers, actors), and people who were employed by their relatives (often for very large salaries). I can’t imagine what sort of valuable information the average salary of those people provides. Or (b) it is limited to people with federally guaranteed loans, which at some of those schools are very few Either way, even if you cared about measuring compensation to determine the value of education, I don’t think anyone has done a good job generating the data you would need.
Re: #9
While (a) and (b) are certainly valid points for a small subset of colleges with academically elite admissions (with high rates of going to graduate or professional school) and have mostly students from wealthy families and give super-generous financial aid to the others (meaning few or no student loans), most colleges are not like those.
However, the mix of majors tends to be ignored in most of these comparisons, which makes it difficult to come to conclusions from these overall school stats.
Maybe they pick data that tells a familiar story, with slight variations, e.g., I don’t see all 8 Ivies on the list (only 5).
I don’t feel any stake in having Ivies on a list like this. But the omissions are a little bizarre. For years, Dartmouth has led the Ivies in mid-career earnings in many such surveys. And, after the discussions above about the effect of being located in a high-wage market, are we not even a little suspicious of the fact that no NYC-area schools other than Stevens show up? I admire Clarkson and all, but would you want to bet the farm that its graduates really out-earn Columbia graduates on an apples-to-apples comparison (similar majors, similar fields)?
Every Dartmouth grad I know makes very good money.
@JHS, Clarkson is very STEM-heavy, so this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Even if it was, however, when you are talking about schools that are both in the top 10% (where I put both Columbia and Clarkson), individual characteristics will matter far more than school name. I wouldn’t be surprised if in STEM fields, salaries of Clarkson grads are comparable to salaries of Columbia grads.
Not if the Clarkson grads are working in Burlington or Albany, and the Columbia grads in Manhattan. (I confess error, though. Until I checked, I thought Clarkson was in Tennessee.)
Anyway, here’s a comparison of like with like:
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-by-majors/engineering?page=5
We can see that for engineering majors of East Coast schools, Columbia does do better than Clarkson but Clarkson is tied with Cornell.
What a laugher. Who submits their earnings to payscale? Nobody I’ve ever met. Who verifies the data? Nobody.
Earnings data is notoriously–and irremediably–flawed.
If you don’t like the results of this article, just find a different one that uses different methodologies. They are easy to find. 
FIL is an RPI grad, and he never made that kind of money!
The ND law school grad I know makes millions … but my ND grad coworker makes very little.
My alma mater is a relatively unknown engineering school that I would bet has a very high average income among graduates … but no one is going to look at it for a story like this.
These stories are meaningless fluff, but they got all of us to look. 