<p>Whenever I hear stories about students making near-six figures fresh out of college, I often wonder two things
1) What college did they go to?
2) What did they major in?</p>
<p>So I'm wondering, if you are a good student at HYPMS or maybe even UPenn, is there a good chance of earning near 100K fresh out of college? Or is this just a big misconception that most ambitious high school students have?</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s why students go to those schools. They go there to develop their insights and intellectual skills as much as possible among equally capable and motivated peers. Whether they then try to parlay those skills into immediate six-figure salaries is up to them, but I’d suggest that most try to parlay them into satisfying lives, careers, and relationships. Down the road, those same talents tend to make for successful careers in mid-life. But if it’s all about income, then I’d recommend a pharmacy degree from a state university.</p>
<p>There was an article in the Daily Pennsylvanian this week that said it is decidedly towards the “just a big misconception” side.</p>
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<p>But, a PharmD is more than just undergrad…</p>
<p>jobs on wall street still pay 6 figures (or close) one year out of college. In investment banking you’ll work 100 hours a week and earn 90-120K your first year out of college. In sales and trading the salaries + bonus are similar. In consulting it’s usually 65-70 + 10-15 bonus. Getting into these positions is doable from any top university. The worse the university the less positions available on campus. Harvard, Wharton and Princeton place best overall across all divisions at top banks / hedge funds/ consulting firms. MIT does well with quant roles. The next set of schools that do extremely well are Stanford, UPenn general, Columbia, Dart, Duke, Yale, obviously some of these schools place better in certain divisions than others, but this is the overall “I want to land a 6-figure salary within a couple of years” distinction. The next set of schools are Cornell, Brown, Northwestern, WUSTL, Chicago, Amherst, Williams, Berkeley, Georgetown, stern at NYU. I might be missing a few, but many others are good semi-target schools and you’ll land a high paying job if you are close to the top of your class (like top 10%).</p>
<p>At a top target school you can be top 30-50% in the class and land a very high paying job in finance. At Columbia (for example) trading and banking divisions at a top 10 bank even interview kids with like a 3.3 GPA, with otherwise good credentials.</p>
<p>The 6 figures out of college is somewhat of a myth. $100k with NYC cost of living plus 80-100 hour weeks is not a great paying job.</p>
<p>^except it isn’t. Sales and Trading divisions at banks pay six figures (or close like 90K) your first year out of college for 60-65 hours a week. Hedge funds recruiting on the best campuses are the same. I’m a senior at Columbia intending to work in finance/consulting, I worked in finance/consulting over the summer. I also have family and close friends at various divisions and positions on wall street. NYC cost of living is high, but at 100k your first year out of college without a family it is easy to save 10-20K. Your second and third years could be significantly higher. I knew a few third year analysts and first year associates earning close to 200K 3-4 years out of college. NYC or not, that allows for a huge saving or an extravagant living style.</p>
<p>What you give up is job security, you are in a high stress environment, many around you are soulless and highly competitive, you’ve had to be very smart and hardworking to get in in the first place, and often at the start of your career, you do a lot of btch work.</p>
<p>kville,
When measured on a Cost of Living and Quality of Life basis, you may be right that there is not great value in those NYC jobs…in the short term. However, what you may not be factoring in is how these jobs often position these students for their 2nd and 3rd jobs. Done intelligently, these jobs are part of one’s career path with ever higher compensation possibilities or other employment opportunities that one gets exposed to. If you want VC or PE or hedge funds or highest end consulting, these jobs can usually enable you to at least get a look. </p>
<p>These jobs have also historically been major feeders to the top graduate business schools. That path is a little less open today because the Grad B-schools feel a bit burned by having had so many eggs in the Wall Street basket. I think that it is clear that they will be less willing to enroll a class with 25-40% coming from the Street and that 2-year analyst community.</p>
<p>My cousin is making $70k a year, first year out of college, degree in construction management, graduated from mid level non flagship state university.</p>
<p>According to UPenn survey of graduates from 2008, the highest salaries were in Financial Services, Consulting and Technology, capping at $85,000. Average signing bonus (across all industries, though) was $7,476. So, not quite 6 figures, but close enough. Interestingly, the widest range of salaries was reported in Investment Management, $32,500 - $85,000. Of course, these job offers were before the market crashed in September.</p>
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<p>There are several jobs that pay well right out of college like these 2 mentioned above and typical engineering jobs. Yet it’s important to note that salaries for these careers rise slowly from there and quickly hit a ceiling. In 5 years the pharmacist who started at $85K will probably be making $105K and the engineer who started at $60K will be lucky to be making $75K.</p>
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<p>Yet these salaries will grow much more quickly and not hit a ceiling. The WS guy five years out can expect to be making over half a million and the consultant over $300K with much higher salaries to look forward to. And all of this can be achieved with just an undergrad degree from a top school in many cases.</p>
<p>“Harvard, Wharton and Princeton place best overall across all divisions at top banks / hedge funds/ consulting firms.”</p>
<p>Could we take this to mean that Harvard, Wharton, and Princeton are most to blame for our current economic crisis?</p>
<p>No, for that I’d blame MIT and Caltech, it was the quants that crashed the economy.</p>
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<p>Wrong, you are talking about base + signing bonus. I’m talking about Base + end of year bonus, these two can easily sum to over 100k in an average year at a top 10 firm. Year end bonuses can be upto 100% of base in banking, trading, investment management.</p>
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<p>This is down right inflammatory and if serious, logically inconsistency. At any top school, a small proportion of students actually decide to go into finance (except for wharton). People that messed up came from a huge variety of backgrounds, because top schools still comprise a tiny proportion of all students in the US. Finally even if ivy league graduates made pathetic financial models, their decisions probably had nothing to do with the education they received in college. Having a great education, might in some cases, have mitigated irrationality in financial models.</p>
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<p>A CS major coming out of certainly MIT or Stanford, and almost certainly out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Penn, who has also picked up marketable computer/IT skills along the way can certainly earn $100k, or close to it, right out of school. For example, last year Google and Facebook were reportedly offering over $90k to top Stanford CS graduates. </p>
<p>[Google</a>, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar.](<a href=“http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/30/stanford-computer-science-grads-getting-95k-offers-from-google/]Google”>Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar. | TechCrunch)</p>
<p>The key is to have been building marketable skills. The truth is that most CS programs are highly theoretical, and while knowledge of theory does have its uses, it won’t help you to garner a high salary immediately after graduation. On the other hand, if you have strong practical experience, perhaps obtained through part-time consulting work - constructing Oracle data warehouses, developing software within the J2EE/EJB framework, building dynamic & database-driven web applications, or designing a Cisco BGP/OSPF route/switch network, you can easily make over $100k a year right after graduation.</p>
<p>{Heck, you may not even need to graduate at all. A lot of these skills are, frankly, not that hard, and you often times don’t really need a CS degree - or sometimes not any degree at all. For example, it’s really not that hard to learn how to configure a network of Cisco routers and switches. Most high school students could probably learn how. All you really need to do is read the manuals - which are not very hard to understand - and then practice on a test network setup which you can buy used on Ebay for no more than a few thousand dollars. 6-12 months of practice should suffice to pass the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certification exam, after which you can probably find a part-time job paying $20-30/hr without experience. After 4 years of college while working as a Cisco IT guy part-time, and with the CCIE certification in hand and you should be able to find a job paying close to 6 figures. One could do the same with the Oracle or Microsoft certification track. Or one could just learn how to build dynamically driven websites. Frankly, I’m appalled that most high schools not only don’t teach students these topics, but don’t even tell their students they even exist, leaving their graduates with few marketable skills.}</p>
<p>Go to payscale.com to observe the starting and mid-career salary averages. Even from very selective colleges, in most parts of the country and in most fields, and even by mid-career, the average graduate earns less than $100K. The average Pomona College, Middlebury, Wesleyan, UVa, Virginia Tech, or Johns Hopkins (engineering) graduates all make less than $100K even by mid-career. $100K starting-pay jobs are not dropping from trees. </p>
<p>I think hmom has it right. The finance guy is the tortoise; the engineer is the salary hare. But if you want to build wealth AND live a balanced life, in my opinion a Wall Street job is not the answer for most college graduates. Whether you are male or female, you are better off aiming for a long, stable marriage to a competent person who shares your values (about money and other things). A “tandem couple” in not-so-exciting, low-stress, high security federal government jobs in the DC area can fairly easily be earning $250K between them by mid-career. That’s in lower cost of living areas than Manhattan, with 40 hour weeks and flexible hours, nearly 5 weeks/year combined holiday and annual leave allowances, and rather decent benefits overall.</p>
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<p>Actually, the finance guy, if we’re talking Wall Street, is no tortoise. He starts out making more and finishes making multiples of what the average engineer, or anyone on a traditional career path for that matter, makes.</p>
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<p>Different strokes for different folks. The average young person headed for WS would dread a government job and a $250K family income. Your typical Wharton student would describe that as a failed career.</p>
<p>^ I don’t doubt that’s true of the typical Wharton grad, and I don’t especially recommend selling one’s soul to any old branch of the federal government. Not so much because of the money as the stultifying bureaucracy. I doubt the vast majority of Americans would consider a $250K family income, in itself, the mark of a failed career (CC’ers may have higher standards/expectations.) Personally, I’d consider a Wall Street job undesirable compared to a career in academia, the creative side of IT, publishing/journalism, or commercial research at $125K, or so. But you’re not likely to make nearly that salary in those fields starting out.</p>
<p>The payscale.com figures (which do deliberately exclude anyone with more than a bachelor’s degree) indicate that engineering school graduates consistently have higher starting pay than average Ivy League, LAC, and State School graduates. 8 of the top 10 starting salary averages are for engineering schools. A liberal arts education seems to have the salary advantage by mid-career.</p>
<p>Of course, the LAC, Ivy, and State School figures include many arts graduates, etc., in addition to business/finance/econ majors. Maybe someone has good references on starting salaries for the later category alone. I was not thinking of Wall Streeters in particular as the “tortoise”.</p>
<p>^^^tk21769 makes an excellent point. I live in New York and the young people I meet more and more have their eyes on the biological clock. They look at their parents, many of whom delayed having children until their forties, while working for high-paying banking and accounting firms and say, that’s not the way they want to raise their own children. The biggest problem for them is finding that less stressful career that pays well, having already spent the most productive years of their lives on Wall Street. It’s a good argument in favor of living simply and socking away your bonuses in savings while you are putting in those crazy hours.</p>