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<p>Tufts was easier to get into than Wesleyan when I was applying but I guess not anymore. The 61% figure was told to me by someone who worked in the admissions office.</p>
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<p>Ah, you are correct. Payscale covers “full-time employees” only. They exclude “self-employed, project-based, and contract employees”. This really does seem to exclude many successful people with terminal bachelors degrees. I’m not sure I understand the motivation behind this. Maybe they are trying to isolate the effects of college reputations on hiring and promotion decisions. </p>
<p>Methodology description:
[PayScale</a> College Salary Report Methodology](<a href=“2023 College Rankings by Salary Potential | Payscale”>2023 College Rankings by Salary Potential | Payscale)</p>
<p>I have two thoughts, while trying to be as impartial as possible.</p>
<p>First off, the data set needs to be adjusted for location. It’s obviously way more expensive to live in the Bay Area than Oklahoma or something. Thus, salaries need to be higher to fit cost-of-living expenses, but real income is no higher. This is clearly unfair, because it isn’t dependent on the school, but the region. HOWEVER, take into account location when deciding the kinds of career opportunities available to grads – the Bay Area is WAY better than Oklahoma for jobs, especially the Silicon Valley area. Those are high paying jobs because they’re mostly in high tech and management.</p>
<p>Secondly, never doubt the benefits of a tight-knit alumni network. I don’t pretend to know anything about many other alumni networks, but SCU alumni favor SCU grads HEAVILY because it is a small school many don’t consider to be prestigious. To be fair, if I hadn’t found College Confidential, I wouldn’t know schools like Colgate, Bucknell or Northwestern even existed, and I would think Gonzaga was a difficult school to get into. The prestige game is limited to a select few schools (and I mean about 10 or 15, not the top 25 or top 50), make no mistake. Beyond that, regional name recognition is king.</p>
<p>Oh, and the figure for grad school-bound graduates at SCU is less than 10% for 2008. That’s my piece, think of it what you will. Hopefully it sheds a little light on the situation.</p>
<p>EDIT: Also, whoever said something about students coming from money is right. The average parental income at SCU is pretty darn high, which I’m sure has a ton to do with the rankings as well. Including this for impartiality’s sake :)</p>
<p>Haha that’s great. I bet a similar percent at tufts are brown rejects</p>
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<p>It’s not how many go to grad school directly out of UG but how many get a graduate degree by the time that they are in mid-career, the median of which was 15 1/2 years out of UG in the Payscale survey.</p>
<p>My bad – thanks for correcting that. Then I don’t know what the figure is :P</p>
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Except Dartmouth is not an average setting. Children of less wealthy parents who are now at Dartmouth are not your average low scocioeconomic status kids; they’ve done something exceptional to get to where they are now.</p>
<p>I’d say that the majors would be applicable, but not by schools.</p>
<p>" , philosophy majors earn more than I.T. majors mid career,"</p>
<p>Yeah, but on their study they listed computer science and computer engineering both seperate from “I.T.”</p>
<p>which means yeah, philosophy majors make more than the kids who went to ITT tech for a year and a half and answer phones all day.</p>
<p>Let’s just assume, for now, that the data is adequately representative of the truth, despite the potential statistical flaws. Not a good assumption, but not necessarily in bad faith considering this kind of data is hard and rare to come by.</p>
<p>I say if we take into account the incomes of the students attending top schools, we might be able to explain the conclusion that some research done awhile ago came to: attending elite schools doesn’t necessarily help unless one comes from a low income household, in this case there is a palpable difference in future earnings.</p>
<p>Now for one, lets realize this, the median household income at pretty much all of these top schools, excluding perhaps MIT, will be far over 200,000/yr. How do I know this? At Harvard and Yale the percentage of students receiving institutional FA hovers around 50% and at Stanford slightly over 40%. Now, let’s think about this for a moment, do you know how high your income has to be to not be eligible for a dime of FA at these top schools? At HY if your income is lower than 180k and 200k respectively with one child in college, you’ll only pay 10% or less of your income towards your child’s college education. And obviously, not just because you make 1 dollar more, do you go from hefty FA to no FA. So we can imagine, that at HY you’ll have to be making well over 230k and 250k respectively to receive zippo, with one child in college that is. However, many people have 2 children in college at the same time! We can only imagine what the threshold is with two children in college for receiving no FA! And remember, roughly 50% of HY students receive institutional need-based FA. So, obviously we don’t have the exact numbers, but we can imagine the neighborhood of the median household income to be really, really high.</p>
<p>Now, how many of these talented, motivated, kids at these top schools are really going to end up making less than their parents (when adjusted for inflation) when they are of the age to send their kids to college? Sure you may say, well not all kids at top schools are in there for the money-say many of them do, for example, Teach for America! I would counter that most students only do Teach for America for about 2 years and many of the alumni apply to, you guessed it, top law schools and prestigious financial firms. And even let’s say, they decide to be school teachers. Which schools will they be working at? Low-income inner city publics? How many people in the inner city have had an Ivy league educated teacher? It can’t be many. Most of these teachers will be working at upper middle class suburban publics or top privates where the incomes for teachers after 10 years of work will easily run over 100k/yr. And do you think these teachers will be married, to say, other teachers? Or someone else who makes more money than them? Now, that was just an example, but don’t assume that the fact that a sizable portion of top school grads go into not so lucrative fields directly after graduation means that they are going to be pulling in a not so good income several years down the road.</p>
<p>Now, that I have shown that most wealthy top school grads will be making as much as their wealthy parents, I’m going to try to show that less wealthy top school grads will try to make as much as their wealthier peers parents. At these top schools, you’ll see a lot of affluence. Why, just on facebook, I have seen pictures of my friends going to exotic places around the world for vacation, and it would take someone with character much stronger than mine to not be at least a little envious if, like me, you can’t afford to go on these such excursions every summer. Now here’s where more of the psychology comes in, but think about it, most of these less than wealthy students are very ambitious to come to a school such as HYS. I’m guessing close to none of them had legacy advantages, and they worked very hard to get into these schools. So they are going to want work hard, make the most of their opportunities so their children can afford to go on these vacations and have the experiences that they could never afford to have. Even though I personally swear by my public school preparing me very well for college, I would at least want to have the financial choice of sending my kid to a good private high school like Andover or Exeter. Even though I don’t go to exotic places for vacation and can’t honestly say I suffered from that, I would at least want to experience what it is like to be able to do it and pay for it without caring much about the bill. So for reasons in the same vein as these, the lower income top school grads will benefit and be motivated from living and being surrounded by wealth, and wanting it for themselves. At most state schools, you aren’t surrounded by such wealth per capita.</p>
<p>Now does this make top schools worth the cost? In a way, it sort of does. If you’re wealthy it really doesn’t matter much now does it? You’re already rich so what’s the differential to you? If you’re lower income, you’re going to get a benefit and not end up paying much. I contend that even if you are in that sticky upper middle class area, you may still benefit by being surrounded by those still much more wealthier than you.</p>
<p>Discuss.</p>
<p>I think the one big thing that people should take a look at is the fact that Dartmouth’s starting salary is significantly lower than all of the other highest ranked schools (on this ranking), and that the mid career salary is then the highest. If this doesn’t represent the quality of Dartmouth’s education (or at least students), then I don’t know what does. Your initial salary is based on the combination of a school’s prestige and your gpa, and 10 years out represents your performance on the job. Dartmouth students seem to be underrated upon graduation, and their value to an employer significantly increases after seeing how they perform on the job.</p>
<p>I also realize that this could be a function of not just education, but also a student being hard working, their ability to network, continued alumni/school support, or as the case with me, pure physical attractiveness. (self-call!)</p>
<p>Tacos. That is all.</p>
<p>Or just a result of a bunch of Dartmouth kids sitting around filling out a phony survey. There is zero verification of those you know.</p>
<p>This survey has been discussed for a very long time on these threads.
The most significant thing to me about the discussions, whether people like the survey or don’t, is that nobody is surprised by the results.</p>
<p>^Not necessarily true. I don’t think many people expected PUNYB, Bucknell, or even Colgate to be up that high. In all honesty, I’ve never even heard of PUNYB before.</p>
<p>Okay, I give. What is PUNYB?
Bucknell graduates a large number of engineers who can do well with a terminal BS. Colgate has an affluent student body. Family business and family connections make sense to me.
No answer for PUNYB. Didn’t even come up on google.</p>
<p>Okay, Brooklyn Poly. Numbers oriented folks 10 minutes from Wall Street. Got it. Likely also a small sample size.</p>
<p>But are they happy? That’s the big question.</p>
<p>While certainly an admirable endeavor to try to measure this effect, I feel it’s only a matter of time now that Payscale has gained prominence and maybe more credibility before WUSTL is commissioning a bunch of students in a library basement somewhere to fill out fictional surveys claiming they are the Class of '92 from WUSTL, have no graduate degree and are now making $500K a year, while simulataneously filling out fictional surveys claiming they are the Class of '92 from Northwestern, have no graduate degree and are now making $50K a year to look better comparatively.</p>
<p>Not all that long ago something called Pensacola Bible College or the like was the top rated school on Students Review. GIGO.</p>