<p>^Except that with the Payscale study, seven of the top 10 schools are Ivys or Stanford, MIT and the other three are at least reasonably good schools (with at least two renowned for having strong alumni networks and Harvey Mudd having a very strong class profile), so it shouldn’t be exactly characterized as “Garbage Out”.</p>
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It only proves that these schools have better students in the BOTTOM HALF, how is that a relevant study.</p>
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<p>How is it not a relevant study? All schools have top students that are going to succeed no matter where they go. Measuring what the bottom half end up doing is a truer measure what the college is doing for them to me. Plus, if you figure how to go onto to a successful career without needing a graduate degree, I don’t think that automatically places you in the bottom half of the class. One could just as easily look at it the other way around that the ones that need graduate school in order to jump start their careers are the “bottom half” of the class.</p>
<p>It’s not just graduate or professional degrees. It excludes entrepreneurs, people who work for themselves (e.g., consultants, free lance writers and artists, etc) or with their own business…</p>
<p>Besides, this is not a scientific study, not even a survey. PayScale’s data is self-reporting … that is, people report their salary (you can just make it up) when they want to search for certain salary data in PayScale’s database. And what kind of people visit PayScale? … typically people who want to change job/career or relocate … in other words, mostly losers.</p>
<p>Most of the schools that rank highly on the Payscale list have very strong alumni networks-Dartmoouth, Duke, Notre Dame, Colgate, Holy Cross, and Bucknell.</p>
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<p>Given the disparate career choices that grads go onto, it’s better than any other measure of mid-career salary out there. </p>
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<p>Well, I guess schools that are generally considered some of the best out there (Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Stanford, Princeton, Colgate, Notre Dame, Penn, Yale) are top 10 for best “losers”. Plus, wanting to change job/career or relocate doesn’t mean one is a “loser” unless you consider the majority of all MBA students “losers”.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with using PayScale. The problem is drawing statistical conclusions on a ransom sample of data not intended for this purpose. I give it the same credibility as PayScale’s prediction on the March Madness Final Four.</p>
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I doubt if most MBA students ever used PayScale. Besides, MBA’s are EXCLUDED from this study.</p>
<p>If you believe in this “College Salary Report” from PayScale, you will have to believe in another report in the same section - “Most Popular Schools By Job”:</p>
<p>“If you have a specific career in mind before picking a college, it makes sense to find out where people in that same career attended school. We’ve taken a sampling of popular jobs and asked PayScale users in those fields where they earned their degree. See which universities top the list of popular schools for each profession.”</p>
<p>"Top Accounting Schools:</p>
<p>Lakeland College
Saint Martin’s College
Husson College
Dowling College
Sullivan University
Berkeley College…"</p>
<p>Same report, same methodology…</p>