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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>