Prestige of U Chicago

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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^ As I said, this is not Payscale (the company) data! This is US Govt treasury data and unless you are telling me that only UChicago students disproportionately obtain graduate degrees (not borne out by the facts published by Washington Monthly, at least Caltech, MIT, Princeton do better and Georgia Tech is in the top 20 in its field) and other publications, every school would have these kinds of students, so in the grand scheme of things they even out for most schools, specially the elite schools like HYPS and many many more.

Your sister’s case is also not exclusive to any one school, that it would overly bias the statistics at one school over another. I think Uchicago is a fantastic school, but I strongly dispute your assertion that “such income outcomes are more likely at intellectual power houses like the University of Chicago” Many many students from state schools follow the path of your sister. Even students from other elite schools follow the same path, so the data from these schools would also be subject to the same “depression” as the school your sister went to. Again this is not “self selective” data that is reported by “Payscale”, the company. It is required data that these students receiving federal grants have to submit to the US treasury, so there is no self selection bias in the data either.

And I would argue that pay data is a profoundly important indicator (although should not by any means be the only one) in judging the schools.

For example, why would a student in the top 25% of earners at Harvard earn 40% more than a student in the top 25% of earners at Columbia 10 years after enrolling? Are you somehow saying that the students at Columbia pursue more graduate degrees and take more time off work than Harvard students (Again not borne out in the data collected by other publications). In every bucket, Harvard kids are doing better than Columbia kids, whether it is the 10th percentile or 90% percentile. Whether it is 10 years after enrollment or whether it is 6 years after enrollment. And most of these kids stay in the Northeast after graduation, so it is clearly not a geographical discrepancy.

Again I am not claiming that you should only evaluate schools based on pay. There is much more to college than pay outcomes. But you would be foolish not to look at the data.

To get back to the OP’s question on prestige, what I am saying is that it is better to to go to a “so called mediocre” school and perform better, than go to an elite school and be average. Prestige does not shower success on all the alums of a prestigious school. Lots of kids who go to these prestigious schools don’t have good outcomes.

So the real question should be

Will I get a good education at the school?
Will I be able to thrive at the school?

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@JHS Congratulations on the success of your progeny. If he/she is earning far better than the Georgia Tech grad in the top 25%, then he/she is most likely in the top 10-20% of earners from UChicago. Not everybody who goes to UChicago ( or for that matter, other elite schools) is that successful. In fact most are not, based on the data provided by the US treasury. The median of UChicago grads 10 years after enrollment is $68,200

Much as I love UChicago, this is not the university, but your genetics and his/her hard work that is producing these results :slight_smile:

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@darth1289 I’m sorry, but I feel obligated to state that your methodology is completely unreliable. The number you’re providing us simply cannot tell us anything; any inference you make is easily discarded for lack of warrant.

(1) UChicago perhaps produces more PhD students than its peer schools; it’s more closely aligned with the top LACs for proportion of students continuing on to PhDs according to: http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/ (The Washington Monthly data disagrees with the collegesolution.com data, but neither is telling us the methodology of that data).

(2) Your citation of salary is meaningless as you’ve entirely failed to provide any sort of context. Where are graduates living? This affects cost of living and therefore salary. What types of jobs are graduates pursuing? It could be the case that graduates from these schools intentionally pursue very different types of careers that have very different pay grades. More students at other colleges perhaps pursue STEM subjects, or financial jobs.

Your entire argument about salary wants us to follow your long list of premises (assumptions) that lack any sort of evidentiary support. Frankly, your argument isn’t convincing (it may be valid, but you have no way of demonstrating this).

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@NYU2013 I am not making any sweeping generalizations based on salary data. I understand all the limitations of the data set. Yes, salary data could be different based on a lot of reasons between different universities. I have already stated that major makes a big difference in salaries, even more so than the university. Perhaps you missed that.

All I am stating is the following based on the question asked by the OP

“Prestige of an institution, doesn’t guarantee good outcomes as measured by salary data”.
“You could go to some very prestigious universities and still land up doing quite poorly, outcome wise and you could go to so called “not so prestigious universities” and do quite well”
“Using Prestige to choose an institution is less useful than choosing actual major and excelling in your major from a competent university”

I would think that none of the above observations are particularly earth shattering or controversial :slight_smile:

I just used the salary data to make those points to give some context. I think that the salary data, however limiting makes the point powerfully that you can go to a lets say a less prestigious university and do better than a student at a very prestigious university, provided you apply yourself. For example both Princeton and Texas A&M award about the same percentage of STEM degrees (around 37%) but a student in the top 25% of earners at Texas A&M does better than the median Princeton grad. My point being, it is better to be a big fish in a small pond, than a small fish in a big pond.

Malcolm Gladwell makes this point powerfully in his book “David vs Goliath”, probably much better than I did :slight_smile: but the salary data seems to bear his observations out.

Here is a link to his main point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc

Anyway, the salary data was almost an appendix to my main argument of what really hindered Cihcago’s rise in the “prestige hierarchy”. I think we have digressed way too far from the original question of the OP as to whether the University of Chicago is as prestigious as other schools and started a totally different topic now, so lets get back to the original discussion.