Fire fighters and police officers have their own post-high-school education and training that they must go through, so it is not like they are uneducated.
Also, if you are so jealous of their pay, why not go into those professions yourself?
Washington and Lee, Babson, Villanova, Bentley, Georgetown, and Upenn all grant more than 20% of their undergrad degrees in Business. Bucknell is about 15%. The weighting scheme and the time point in career used tends to treat schools with business majors favorably.
The sample size for Harvard is rather small presumably due to the no-loan policy. Harvard feeds into consulting and Wall Street which have high early career salaries. Harvard sends one of the lowest percentages of students in to the Peace Corp…
In general, my feeling is that data is like food - the more you process it, the less healthy it is for consumption.
Both ROI and Value-Add studies have a lot of hidden ingredients that are not listed on the packaging.
“The value of this list is dubious at best but the real take home lesson is how absurdly overpriced even top colleges are. The average earnings of a fireman(HS grad) in San Diego is 150k and this is true for many many government jobs. Just go google the salaries of the government workers and you will be shocked at how many uneducated or relatively uneducated people far out earn average top college grads. This is the real scandal. Today in America uneducated regular cops and fireman will over a lifetime far out earn most of the graduates from the elite colleges.”
Why is this scandalous? Some very difficult jobs simply don’t require an education. It is that simple. You don’t get paid for an education. You get paid to do work. If the work can be accomplished without an education, an education isn’t going to add anything to the outcome for the employer and it won’t add to the employee’s pay check. Why should it?
There is a limited pool of people willing and capable of doing certain hard jobs. They are paid for those hard jobs. Why shouldn’t they be? If you have a phD and want to be a fire fighter-go for it but don’t expect your PhD to result in a higher wage than the gal holding the hose next to you with her GED. Does that mean the PhD was a waste? Well that depends on what your goal was when you set out to get one. Same with college.
An education does provide you with things that you might miss without one. One of those is wider options. A degree from a good school provides more options than not having a degree. A degree from a great school will probably provide wider options than a degree from a ok school-assuming other factors are equal. The best ranking system would rank schools according to which gave graduates the widest array of options. It is an unattainable ranking. An extraordinary school may steer their graduates into careers that they believe to be socially responsible and service oriented rather then into careers because they pay well. If so, as a group, the graduates will have lower salaries than the average graduate of a mediocre school that steers students to Goldman Sachs. But those graduates from the great school had more options than those that graduated from Mediocre U. They simply opted to take a different path.
Educated people often make the choice not to be a government worker because of the limitations they perceive those jobs to have. Then some are astounded to find the pay allows a living wage and they begrudge those who made the choice to pursue a government job that living wage. it is something I don’t understand. If my house were burning down or there was a shooter in a mall, you can bet I’d like the first responders to be the most qualified people available for that job. And, having a bright, quick, competent group to respond to that emergency would be as important to me as ensuring that my accountant had those characteristics. Getting the best people costs more than getting the least competent. Thankfully most municipalities are willing to pay for competent employees. Thank about that next time you encounter an emergency.
This is really good information! Measuring outcomes is great!