<p>[Times</a> Poll: Frequently Asked Questions - Los Angeles Times](<a href=“Times Poll: Frequently Asked Questions”>Times Poll: Frequently Asked Questions)</p>
<p>the data is worthless because the methodology is worthless. anyone who knows anything about statistics would recognize that payscale’s approach is useless. zeroth rule of statistics: random sampling required.</p>
<p>Gellino, didn’t you go to colgate?</p>
<p>“I feel that when people want to correct for this that they are failing to appreciate that, on average, the children of wealthier families are more likely to have higher intelligence and greater earnings potential, which is why they are descended from families with higher income in the first place. It’s very difficult to separate out connections and inherent effects of wealth from raw intelligence and ambition.”</p>
<p>Evidence? Are you saying that students receiving need-based aid at Dartmouth are likely to have less intelligence and lower earning potential than those who pay full freight?</p>
<p>I do find this helpful, since I’m one who will be majoring in liberal arts and earning a good starting salary may be difficult… I didn’t know how much of a salary boost top universities can give one.</p>
<p>Patriot League schools-Colgate, Holy Cross, Bucknell rank highly.</p>
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You’re distorting his conjecture. He’s saying that the average low-income person is less likely to be intelligent; the low-income student at Dartmouth is certainly an exception to this trend.</p>
<p>Anyways, here is the “evidence”: higher SAT scores -> more prestigious university, more prestigious university -> higher income. Is this always true? Obviously not; not all people at prestigious universities go on to lead high-income lives, and many people at non-prestigious universities will nonetheless go on to lead high-income lives. And of course, the SAT is not objective in the sense that lower-income students will not be able to afford proper preparation or will even receive a proper K-12 education.</p>
<p>Are socioeconomically disadvantaged students ultimately stuck in their social class throughout the course of their lives? Many times yes, and that is why I disagree with the intelligence hypothesis. Alas, it has dwindled down to another nature vs. nurture argument, and my belief is that there is little, if any, significant natural intelligence difference between the high and low class. Obviously, the upper class will generally have more “nurturing” and thus will likely be in a better financial situation later on in life.</p>
<p>“You’re distorting his conjecture. He’s saying that the average low-income person is less likely to be intelligent; the low-income student at Dartmouth is certainly an exception to this trend.”</p>
<p>Let’s look at what he actually said: </p>
<p>"“I feel that when people want to correct for this that they are failing to appreciate that, on average, the children of wealthier families are more likely to have higher intelligence and greater earnings potential, which is why they are descended from families with higher income in the first place. It’s very difficult to separate out connections and inherent effects of wealth from raw intelligence and ambition.”</p>
<p>In other words, the children of wealthier parents at Dartmouth (or anywhere else) are likely to have higher intelligence and greater earnings potential than children of less wealthy parents at Dartmouth or anywhere else. </p>
<p>And this hypothesis is an easy one to test, at least as regards earning potential (but no university is going to want to release the data, even if they have it.)</p>
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I’m skeptical about this explanation. I think an alternate explanation is plausible: Philosophy majors tend to start at lower salaries than IT/tech majors; however, they rise higher in the ranks due to superior communication skills, as well as greater interest in solving interpersonal problems that affect people in teams. Tech majors start out at higher salaries, but hit a plateau. They don’t break into leadership positions as easily. </p>
<p>Or it may be that philosophy majors who stop at a Bachelors degree tend to be daring, risk-taking spirits. They either become entrepreneurs, or else they go off to meditate on mountain tops and don’t participate in surveys like this. Who knows? It’s self-reported data.</p>
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What undergraduate effect? This survey EXCLUDED the BEST students from each school. In addition to those who want to be lawyers, doctors or MBA, most of the top graduates in science, social science, humanities and professional fields continue to get graduate degrees in their own fields, or become entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>I agree that this whole thing is pretty ridiculous, but it served one useful purpose: I’m ending my day on a happy note. Not only do the prestige junkies get trashed all over the place (LIU comes in ahead of Wellesley!) but I never knew I was this good at earning money. And I went to some very low prestige colleges.</p>
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<p>Yes, but is still doesn’t change the fact that 61% of the class at Colgate was W/L or rejected at Dartmouth; so there are students that are still pretty capable at Colgate that are similar to and drawn to the same pursuits as the Dartmouth students.</p>
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<p>The effect of seeing how far your undergrad degree can take you without any further schooling. I think the true measure of how a school should be perceived is how the bottom half of the class does. All schools have top students that go onto to do good things; this approach avoids cherry-picking only the top students. Plus, I don’t think they are excluding all the best students. To me, they are including the best students (the ones that didn’t need a graduate degree to be highly successful {and becoming an entrepreneur does not require a graduate degree}) and the worst students, who aren’t able to get into a graduate program.</p>
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<p>This is not what I was trying to imply at all. I felt what you were insinuating was that the rankings were in the order they were because these schools had the wealthiest students with the best connections as opposed to these schools had the most capable, ambitious students who find a way to have the highest salaries.</p>
<p>so colgate is to dartmouth as tufts is to brown/apparently harvard 
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<p>I agree with most of what hookem168 said. My gut instinct is that a very high percentage of students (I’m not looking up the stats) who attend Ivy League schools and its peers will go on to earn an advanced degree. These charts leave out a huge chunk of these student populations, while other colleges like Lehigh or Santa Clara are at an advantage because a larger percentage of their students will stop at a bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>The elite schools with the most ambitious students are at a disadvantage using this methodology.</p>
<p>I think Colgate and Dartmouth is just a clear example when looking at the two from a geographic environment, social and sports structure perspective. I think Bucknell is very similar to both schools and maybe not coincidentally why it also shows up pretty high on the Payscale rankings. It maybe is more a study on how effective an alumni network is (other than the engineering schools) than exactly who has the best students that don’t go on to get a graduate degree, which is maybe why Notre Dame shows up so high on there too.</p>
<p>I don’t know enough about Tufts to appreciate its stereotypes. In some ways, it seems more similar to other LACs than the nat’l universities that I would think it would have more of a Brown/Wesleyan overlap than one with Harvard.</p>
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<p>If the elite schools are at a disadvantage then why are Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Penn among the top 10? I don’t know much about Santa Clara, other than according to Bend it like Beckham it has a women’s soccer team, but would guess that at Lehigh over half of its alums still go on for some kind of graduate degree. Otherwise, it’s tough to isolate whether someone’s UG or grad degree is the reason for the current salary if you start looking at alums with graduate degrees.</p>
<p>Yeah, I think tufts isn’t easier to get into then Wes but I agree about bucknell</p>
<p>is that 61% an actual stat</p>
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<p>It shows the strength of the programs at Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, etc. despite unfavorable criteria. They would be even stronger if advanced degrees were counted. I can understand that these charts may be used to examine the advantages of pure undergrad degrees… but these figures should obviously not to be used to rank colleges and say “X college is better than Y university in the long run,” which seems to be what the NYT is implying. Why aren’t colleges like Columbia, UChicago, Cornell, etc. on the list? Clearly Lehigh is better than UChicago in the long run, right? Maybe Lehigh would be better in some fields, but it isn’t as clear cut as the charts suggest. I think the majors charts in the article are much more useful than the college charts. I was just pointing out the bias I see in the data.</p>
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<p>This is a narrow view of the “best”. Go to many of the Wikipedia entries for elite colleges and find the lists of prominent alumni. You will find many distinguished, famous, and often very wealthy graduates who never earned an advanced degree (or sometimes never even graduated from college). These include journalists, artists, entertainers, and business executives or entrepreneurs. </p>
<p>Not that these people are necessarily reporting their salaries to payscale.com, either.</p>
<p>Again, the point of this survey is to try to identify a correlation between attending specific colleges and future earnings. If you included people who earned graduate degrees, how would you isolate the effect on earnings of attending each college from the effect of earning the graduate degree?</p>
<p>The full payscale rankings list (with Chicago, Cornell, etc) is here:
[Top</a> US Colleges ? Graduate Salary Statistics](<a href=“2023 College Rankings by Salary Potential | Payscale”>2023 College Rankings by Salary Potential | Payscale)</p>
<p>The Forbes ranking of “top colleges for getting rich” is here:
[url=<a href=“In Pictures: Top Colleges For Getting Rich”>In Pictures: Top Colleges For Getting Rich]In</a> Pictures: Top Colleges For Getting Rich - Forbes.com<a href=“I%20think%20this%20was%20based%20on%20a%20previous%20year’s%20payscale%20data.%20Nearly%20all%20the%20top%2020%20are%20%22elite%22%20schools,%20wiith%20Chicago%20at%2011%20and%20Cornell%20at%2014.”>/url</a></p>
<p>The Dale-Krueger research, it seems, has been widely misinterpreted. It does not appear to debunk the perceived benefits of attending elite colleges and universities. Their 1998 working paper showed a correlation between college selectivity, or cost, and future earnings (even after adjusting for the tendency of elite schools to admit students with characteristics related to earnings capacity.) The correlation was stronger for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But in my opinion, it looks like the jury is still out on these issues (and the verdict may need to adapt to changes in the average cost of attending elite schools).</p>
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Entrepreneurs are EXCLUDED in this survey, as are people with their own businesses.</p>
<p>So you are left with the bottom half of the student body. The survey also favors schools that send many graduates to high paying jobs that require nothing more than a bachelor degree, like Wall Street … and rich kids who work for daddy.</p>
<p>I cannot believe this ranking got ANY attention in the press given its limitations. I suspect that well over half the graduates from top schools go on to earn an additional degree–so surveying ONLY those who pursued no further education is skewing the data towards atypical graduates in atypical jobs.</p>