<p>You guys might want to read and check this out.</p>
<p>Most</a> Underrated Colleges In America - Business Insider</p>
<p>Payscale rankings are confounded by the distribution of majors at each school. Of course, a school that is full of engineering majors will do well in Payscale compared to one with lots of other majors with worse job prospects (1-4, 6-8, 10, 11, 14, 22 in that article are engineering-heavy schools). The same goes for schools that are in regions with high pay levels, although those regions also have high cost of living that mean that the high pay level may seem like less than it actually is (1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 19, 20, 23 in that article are in high pay regions).</p>
<p>You raise some pretty good points (I was thinking about the engineering aspect too). Still, it’s an interesting list and just goes to show that every college offers an increased amount of opportunities, no matter what it’s ranking. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve fallen victim before to the prestige of the Ivies and other top schools, but it remains true that every college has it’s advantages (I mean, $117,000 mean mid-career salary for students from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University? That’s not exactly expected from a school ranked #139.)</p>
<p>South Dakota School of Mines should have been on that list, for sure.</p>
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<p>PINYU is a school that is almost all engineering and CS majors, and is located in a place where pay levels are among the highest in the country. So that result is not especially surprising. Compare to NYU-proper, with more of the lower paid majors (though it also has a well recruited business school).</p>
<p>This method of identifying underrated colleges might make sense if salary outcome is among your main criteria for choosing a school. US News does not measure salary outcomes. Fairly many alumni of USNWR’s top-ranked schools choose relatively low-paying fields (college & secondary school teaching, government, international NGOs, etc.)</p>
<p>From what i’ve read on CC, engineering is one of the few exceptions. These rankings are just as deceptive as the USNWR one though. A business-oriented economics student might think that going to CPSLO might be better than going to UCLA for example, based on the median-income rankings. But since Payscale doesn’t break down the rankings by major, it’s possible that CPSLO grads face worse job prospects, or lower pay, and have worse opportunities provided by their university (internships, employers interviewing on campus, etc.)</p>
<p>Additionally, many people these days (including at a lot of elite schools) make a lot of money through professional degress, which payscale excludes. Look, for example at the median mid-career (i.e. age 45) salary of graduates of these law schools. With the exception of Boston University, the top 10 is filled with the usual suspects:</p>
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<p>[In</a> Pictures: The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/07/rich-law-school-grads-salaries-leadership-careers-education_slide.html]In”>In Pictures: The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich)</p>
<p>People who went to these schools, and earn this amount of money, are excluded from the Payscale ranking.</p>
<p>The takeaway? Take every ranking with a grain of salt. There is no magic university that will make you successful, or that’s worth drowning yourself in debt because of its ‘median salary.’</p>
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<p>Even then, the listings may be less valuable than they appear. What if a student wants nothing to do with majoring in engineering or CS, preferring to major in something that does not have particularly high post-graduation pay prospects? A school like PINYU might not have a major for him/her; even if it did, the student’s post-graduation job prospects would probably be an outlier relative to such a school.</p>
<p>Also, high pay levels tend to come with high cost of living, so a PINYU grad working in New York may have higher pay than an SD Mines grad working in the mountain west, but less left over after the cost of living in New York versus the mountain west.</p>