<p>As long as you like your job. That is all that counts.</p>
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<p>ucb - great data. Really shows the importance of GPA. An interesting third dimension would be URM/non-URM split.</p>
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<p>Someone who has a low cost frugal lifestyle and low/no debt will have a greater range of jobs that s/he can choose from on the basis of non-pay-related criteria, because the minimum level of pay required to live comfortably on a low cost frugal lifestyle is less than for a lavishly expensive lifestyle.</p>
<p>But the point of the post-graduation outcome surveys is to help prospective college students make informed decisions in choice of major and school, rather than find unpleasant surprises at graduation time. Some students may be just fine with the relatively low pay prospects of majors like biology, after knowing that beforehand and making plans to suit (frugal living, avoiding debt, etc.).</p>
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<p>I think the issue is many of these students have no-job or a job at home-town Mickey D’s.</p>
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<p>The point is you’re much more likely to have a humanities major at the wheel than an accounting major.</p>
<p>Even with its flaws, is payscale a better ratings approach than USNWR?</p>
<p>Neither is necessarily better nor worse than the other (some may argue that neither as it is now is particularly helpful for a high school student choosing a school on purely practical matters).</p>
<p>In any case, different students have different goals. For a very pre-professionally oriented student, if Payscale would stratify its reports by both school and major, it would be useful. But it does not, greatly reducing its usefulness. But not all students are very pre-professionally oriented. Prestige-seeking students will probably look to USNWR rankings.</p>
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<p>This issue with USNWR is that it does not include any outcomes factors. That should be one of the main considerations not general perceptions about prestige.</p>
<p>As discussed above, Payscale’s outcome comparisons of schools are of little use due to lack of stratification by major, which may actually be a more significant factor in (job and career) outcome than school for most students and most schools.</p>
<p>Also, not every student is purely pre-professionally oriented.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, I’m confused by your statement, isn’t every college student preprofessional except the ones who apply to doctoral programs or professional programs? The job is the only possible next outcome unless one is doing unpaid research before medical school or is doing a fellowship (Rhodes, Marshall, Fullbright, Udall, etc. etc.).</p>
<p>While most students have some pre-professional motivations (very few would go to college if there were not some “upgrade” in job and career prospects from going to college), the level of pre-professional motivation varies from student to student. Some look at college as purely a means to get a better job, while others have motivations like getting a “well rounded liberal arts education” (however they define that) in addition to pre-professional motivations. (Students applying to graduate and professional study do have pre-professional motivations as undergraduates, since their undergraduate goals including getting into such degree programs.)</p>
<p>UCB, I stupidly posted this same message at your thread providing the specific u Career Center Data. I’m not one to duplicate posts, but I will in this instance.</p>
<p>According to the list of outcomes of recent UCLA bac degrees applying to m-school, U’s [U’s Med-App Outcomes](<a href=“http://career.ucla.edu/Students/GradProfSchCounseling/MedicalSchoolStatisticsForUCLAGraduates.aspx”>http://career.ucla.edu/Students/GradProfSchCounseling/MedicalSchoolStatisticsForUCLAGraduates.aspx</a>) there were 189 who applied and 111 who gained acceptances, or ~ 59%, in 2012. </p>
<p>According to the [aamc website](<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/table2.html”>https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/table2.html</a>), there were 823 students who applied, who did undergrad at UCLA.</p>
<p>As I’ve said before, I’m hardly a statistician, but the total amount of apps would be as follows:</p>
<p>A. Total who applied to m-school w/UCLA bac degree, 2012, 823 (per aamc.org)
B. Total applied who graduated 2012, of those who released info to U, 189 (per U Career Center)</p>
<p>This comes to A/B of a factor of 4.4 of Total Applicants/Those Applicants Whose Outcomes We Know, or 634 applicants of which we know nothing of their outcomes. Would B’s list be the total apps of the U’s graduating seniors in 2012? Doubtful. Hard to place a no., but it’s possible would be in ~300 range, maybe 350.</p>
<p>One figures if 1/4 of apps to med school in any year are reapps (graphic, which I’m too lazy to find and link), we could break it down to the following (assuming nat’l statistics apply to UCLA wrt reapss):</p>
<p>206 Reapps UCLA, who graduated previous to 2012
617 First-Time Applicants, which would be graduates of 2012, and previous years</p>
<p>The 617 is broken down to 189 students whose outcomes we see at the UCLA Career Center, and 428 first-time applicants about whom we know nothing:</p>
<p>206 Reapps
189 2012 graduates (with 111 acceptances)
428 First-time Applicants from 2012 and previous years</p>
<p>The $1M question would be: would the 59% acceptance be fairly close to all 823 applicants?</p>
<p>If so ~ 483 would have gained acceptance to m in 2012 with UCLA bac degrees. Hard to assume this of course, but in some years, UCLA’s total > 500, so %’s have to be pretty stable if not the actual no. who gain acceptance. Small variations in % would affect nos. a lot. Also the no. who apply from UCLA is fairly stable from year to year, ~ 800 or so.</p>
<p>To somewhat disagree with LakeClouds, it’s apparent that the MCAT is most important if one looks at UCLA"s specific nos. wrt grades and MCAT scores. There are fairly pedestrian grades who had acceptances with higher scores, but some with high grades but no acceptances because they had pedestrian scores.</p>
<p>I would think that those who apply to m in the same year they graduate would be at somewhat of a disadvantage because of MCAT preparation. Perhaps a better approach would be to graduate, bide one’s time and prep well for the test. Those with high grades and fairly pedestrian scores who were rejected probably just need to post a higher score, as well as prep better for interviews.</p>
<p>This would just about mirror Cal’s situation also. It was funny to see the l-school acceptances for both u’s just about mirror each other to various specific l’s.</p>
<p>Back to m-school acceptances, is there a bigger wave that follows graduation: in other words, are there more apps, say, in 2013 for the graduating class of 2012? The no. after 2013 would have to dissipate and reduce in years 2014, 2015, to which point it reduces to ~0, I have no idea; I guess it depends on which students are more devoted to becoming MD’s. Time is obviously essential in playing the waiting game towards acceptance.</p>
<p>The thing I noticed, was the m’s for which I would have thought to be “fallbacks” in admission for both u’s didn’t appear to be such. CA m’s are hardest as a group to which to gain admission, but both u’s of med students also had pretty low acceptance rates to oos m’s. I think, what it is is neither u has the name to help the student gain admission to these sets of m’s, certainly in comparison to the Ivy u’s, which are more nationally renowned. What will help both UCLA and Berkl in this, would be as both increase the no. of oos students; ie, a student from NY who does undergrad at either, and applies to NYU med. I’m thinking in the interview process a lot of native CA students who attend UCLA or Berk are kicked out of the process because the oos m’s interviewers might not think of either u’s native CA students as being serious about their schools. This is evident in the yield of UCLA students in applying to oos m’s, and would undoubtedly apply to Berk’s also.</p>
<p>L-school is a different matter. The saying goes: one can always find an l that will take that person. The % acceptances for both u’s mirror each other pretty closely at specific l-centers; it’s uncanny how close they both are, except for that one bad year in HLS admissions for Berk.</p>
<p>Both have a lot of students who attend part-time programs: Berk’s at Golden Gate; UCLA’s at Southwestern and LMU, probably because they could work downtown SF or LA.</p>
<p>If I can gain more info, I’ll do an analysis on the UCLA board. We know, though, that most private u’s pump up their nos, by encouraging students to defer applying to l and m, after which these who do defer don’t count in the %'s of the u’s acceptances to l and m because they are no longer under the the U’s guidance.</p>
<p>Of course, the low acceptance rates to m-school causes a lot of applications per applicant, so the yield at most, probably the predominant no. of m-schools, has to be quite low for lesser known m’s, except for instate students applying to such; in which case, there has to be a weeding-out process of those “outsiders” who are not serious about attending these m’s. Again, I think this has to hurt both Berk and UCLA m-applicants. Undoubtedly, there have to be some relationships (probably informal) that might cause some of these lesser-known m’s to accept a higher % of Berk and UCLA students because of higher yields from these groups of students in the past. Perhaps UCLA applicants to SUNY Buffalo, for instance.</p>
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<p>Assuming this to be the case, than Payscale data address a large percentage of the criteria for those “looking at college as purely a means to get a better job.” USNWR ignores this factor completely.</p>
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<p>Payscale rankings mostly relate to what percentage of the students at any given school are in majors with good job prospects. But the fact that everyone else is getting a job because everyone else is in a major with good job prospects does not mean that a biology major at the same school will have similarly good job prospects. Nor does it mean that someone in a major with good job prospects will have poor job prospects because s/he attends a school that ranks low in Payscale because there are lots of students majoring in subjects like biology with poor job prospects.</p>
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<p>Agree it would be better if payscale had the data by school by major so one could compare biology at school A with biology as school B.</p>
<p>That being said, I still see that the payscale data is a useful indicator as some of the top ranked schools on the list are all STEM focused.</p>
<p>I still think both of you, esp, LakeClouds, place too much importance on major in academic v. trade orientation wrt gaining top paying jobs. Again, some u’s, Harvard, prime example, don’t need trade/vocational majors for its humanities and social science majors to gain high-paying jobs with just baccalaureates without having to go to grad professional school, even though a great no. of Harvard grads do attend grad school. Besides the fact that the more education obtained by a grad means >> earnings than those with just bac degrees. This is true for all disciplines all across the board. Someone with just a trade-oriented bac degree will do well to earn > $100K; someone with a prof grad degree is commonly > $200K. </p>
<p>And, too, Payscale is highly susceptible to u’s prompting their higher-tiered wage-earning bac grads to take the survey. Payscale’s survey figures very highly in some u’s websites – I believe CMC is one along with CPSLO. This probably tells me that both u’s administrations probably push their high-ended earners to survey. This is one of the reasons for high volatility and u’s jumping into the rankings within a year.</p>
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<p>However, the elite schools which attract the investment banking and management consulting recruiters are relatively few. Students not at those schools need to set their post-graduation expectations appropriately if they choose majors like biology that are not in particularly high demand.</p>
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<p>You mean engineering-focused. “STEM” includes biology, which has relatively poor job prospects at graduation.</p>
<p>I actually think that UCLA and UCB and u’s of this level are ones that do well in placing its academic majors into the trades. I know of polisci, history majors that have done well with their stand-alone bac degrees in the world of finance (but not related to WS).</p>
<p>I see that you’re not particularly fond of bio majors. 
This, I’m assuming would include the offshoots of bio within the life sciences, like UCLA’s MIMG, MCDB, and others. I agree that if one can attach another major or minor, even something like chem, this would help a student’s job prospects if medicine were not a possibility. Chem would place the student in more of the hard sciences, which probably includes things like physics and math, which I think would make the candidate more job-prospect worthy than a straight life science, so in that regard I agree. I think more students are becoming wiser and majoring in bio or a more detailed bio field, and minoring in or attaching another major in, say, econ.</p>
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<p>Actually, I use biology as an example to warn people away from the common misconception that “all STEM majors have good job prospects”. Biology is the most common STEM major (something like 13% of Berkeley bachelor’s degrees), but has poor job prospects (similar or worse outcomes for the Berkeley class of 2012 compared to the humanities and social studies majors that people tend to regard as having poor job prospects; see <a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm</a>).</p>
<p>Of course, this does not mean that someone interested in biology should not major in it. But s/he needs to go in aware of the post-graduation prospects and act appropriately (e.g. avoid student loan debt, live frugally, etc.).</p>
<p>Chemistry majors did not seem to do that well in the Berkeley class of 2012 career survey. The three who listed jobs and employers listed ones not related to chemistry (unusually, they managed to get into Bain, Deloitte, and McKinsey, though it is possible that they also had another major in something else).</p>