Um, plenty of kids got offers to start at $100k in Dallas this year. The IB industry raised its starting salary to that, and related industries jumped as well to keep up.
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I agree that there is no substitute for knowing your value and understanding how negotiations work. I think you can always negotiate lightly and politely (not as in your example). And if you are going to negotiate, you always have to be prepared for “no”.
Perhaps, I should edit my post from saying “in high demand fields” to “in fields where companies are competing for top talent” ?
Usually if kids can get 100k or 200k or whatever, they also have (or should start learning anyway) skills on negotiating salary. They often do negotiate :-). But I agree with what you said above about negotiating – that you should.
There are many contributing factors to salary including location, skill set, experience, and position. Regarding location, the Bureau of Labor statistics publishes average earnings for job groupings by location. Some examples for tech groupings are below. Note that these are for all employees in the grouping, not just new grads. In both of these examples San Jose-Sunnyvale was the highest mean earnings location in the United States, and Seattle was 2nd highest after Silicon Valley. When comparing average earnings, it’s also relevant to consider cost of living, which is extremely high in nearly all of the highest mean earnings locations listed below. Cost of living index suggest 2-3x higher cost of living in Silicon Valley than the national average, with a large dependence on rent/home expense.
Software Developer
1 . San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA – $157k
2. San Francisco-Oakland, CA – $145k
3. Seattle-Tacoma, WA – $141k
4. Wenatchee, WA – $133k (small sample)
5. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, CA – $128k
…
Dallas-Fort Worth – $111k
…
Lowest State Average – $53k
Computer Hardware Engineer
1 . San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA – $180k
2. Seattle-Tacoma, WA – $172k
3. Boston-Cambridge, MA – $154k
4. San Diego, CA – $135k
5. San Francisco-Oakland, CA – $135k
…
Dallas-Fort Worth – $117k
…
Lowest State Average – $76k
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Do you have data outside of, I know people, to support this claim, "way more than $200K, because unless responders to the survey are creatively valuing their stock, it’s not way more than $200K? And what’s your definition of more common than thought? You make a lot of generalizations that are not helpful for people trying to figure out ROI, the topic of the thread.
Software Developer
1 . San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA – $157k
Computer Hardware Engineer
1 . San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA – $180k
These are numbers more in line with actual salaries for all employees in high tech in the bay area. And hardware engineers are actually in more demand than software or CS since there are lot less of them now than in the 80s when I was in college.
People don’t look at government websites when making serious decisions . They talk to lots of people and assess how easy or hard is it to get particular types of jobs (in the case of a CS major broken into buckets of starting pay >>200k, 175k to 225k, 150k+, 100k to 150k, etc in geographies that you like) out of a 200, 400, 800 sized graduating class in your major. This sort of conversation was happening in our household regarding Rutgers CS and Madison CS last night, as to whether Madison is marginally better in placing kids in the national job market vs Rutgers has a better regional job market adjacent to it, and what this might mean in practice. What kind of gpa do you need, and how much effort is that GPA, and is there grade deflation — this depends on whether it is an open major with weed out courses or a closed major. And first year GPA does impact the odds of getting interviews for sophomore and junior internships. And then ask where those particular companies are starting new grads, and what is the comp curve like 3y, 5y, 10y out for particular companies, if you are at the 50th percentile, 75th or 90th of the entering cohort. And what sort of the wlb is that in what cola city etc. All of this is not consciously processed, but you have a good sense of this.
Alternately, you may not look at any of these things and major in creative writing. No one is seriously questioning the creative writing major about ROI 
In fact the STEM major is told that you should follow your heart and do something else (never mind the STEM major may be following his heart already )
There are disparate demands on kids to do this that and that ….
No, all I have is:
-
what was contained in 3 SV offer letters to our s in 2020
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feedback from a handful of his friends (also employed in SV) when asked to over/under the $200k mark.
Full disclosure , our S (and most of his college friends) specialize in a particularly hot CS field, but they see many others in the same field. But if the numbers you post are averages does that mean that $200k is not common?
They probably should if truly contemplating ROI. Anecdotes are good to listen to, and perhaps they will be one of them on the positive side (vs negative), but they aren’t the norm compared to actual statistical data.
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We don’t think in terms of ROI. We think in terms of WLB, passion in the area, networking benefits from going to the place, and life time earnings in a career.
When it comes to CS and/or quant, the kids know if they are in contention for the most selective jobs pretty early on. For the CS jobs, they look at how well they do on LeetCode or the internships they can get, whereas for quant, the best indicators are math contest wins … and skill in poker.
For those that don’t get into the most selective positions (at around $400k in total compensation), the next tier is still well over $200k.
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I get that. I don’t care about ROI either as I’ve mentioned a couple of times on this thread, but the thread is about ROI so those reading it who do care about this should certainly look at actual stats for a field, not anecdotal data points akin to “Bill Gates was able to…”
I don’t know a ton of what CS (hardware and software) majors have made as an initial salary from my school or acquaintances, but of those I do know (5 come to mind), those good at it (top of class good) earned 6 figures. The starting number was always 1 and I don’t think the second number was >5. They had multiple offers to choose from and it didn’t matter what type of college they attended. They were just really, really talented with computers before they even went to college. How much they learned in college I’m not sure TBH.
I understand all what you are saying. We are plugged in sufficiently into the field. We know what needs to be done to manage a ~200k start comfortably (greater than 70% chance). It partly depends on the school. It is incorrect to say that the school doesn’t matter – the school matters in determining the probability I mentioned, not the $ amount, for a variety of reasons. Obviously the numbers would be different with different majors.
Payscale (self-reported) lists the following range for entry level software engineer
Base Salary: Overall US
10th percentile – $63k
Median – $86k
90th percentile – $126k
Base Salary: Only Silicon Valley
10th percentile – $97k
Median – $125k
90th percentile – $151k
"Total Pay: Overall US" (includes bonuses, profit share, commissions, …)
10th percentile – $63k
90th percentile – $134k
"Total Pay: Only Silicon Valley" (includes bonuses, profit share, commissions, …)
10th percentile – $97k
90th percentile – $166k
These Payscale numbers are significantly higher than CollegeScorecard, which suggests median tax reported 1st year earnings across all CS majors working full time of ~$70k, with only a small handful of colleges above $100k. NACAC also reports a median of ~$70k. There are several possible reasons for this difference . One is Payscale is only including persons in the job grouping “software engineer”, rather than all CS majors. Another is self-reporting bias. I expect people who choose to become a member on Payscale and self-report their salary on Payscale tend to be more focused on having a higher salary than average. It’s a similar idea to how students who post on this site are not representative of the average high school student.
In addition to location, Payscale listed many skills as being associated with a higher salary. Some examples are below:
ERP – +68%
Distributed Systems – +43%
Zookeeper – +42%
…
While there are an extremely small portion of students who have entry level earnings above $200k, this is not the norm, regardless of college. The average earnings vary significantly by college and have a strong correlation with a combination of portion choosing to working in SV or other vary high cost of living areas and portion of high achieving students. Colleges than have a large portion of students working in SV/Seattle/NYC/Boston/… and have a large portion of high achieving students tend to report median earnings for CS majors in the $100-$130k range.
CMU – $126k (2021)
UC Berkeley – $120k (2021)
Cornell – $116k (2021)
San Jose State – $111k (2019)
This fits with the original comment that started this tangent about a poster being surprised that the ROI numbers for San Jose State were higher than other colleges, including UCs. I expect San Jose State’s relatively high CS salaries (among those than accept full time offers) primarily relates to its location in SV, and a large portion of grads working in SV. This is one area where college name can have a notable influence on earnings. I expect SV companies are far more likely to recruit at San Jose State than at other Cal States that are located far away from SV. However, this higher salary at SJSU does not necessarily mean higher ROI, after controlling for cost of living differences.
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I guess I have an extreme outlier on my hands !!! 
I don’t know why these threads always turn into talks of the few in tech that are at the top of the new graduates and not about the majority who will never make that kind of money.
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If you look a company specific info on sites like Levels ( Google Software Engineer Salary | $187K-$1.2M+ | Levels.fyi ) you see some different data . If you look at Google for instance (I use Google because they hire quite a few new grads) the entry level SWE (L3) has a median (I believe) total compensation at $191k, 75th percentile at $209k and several well above that. Glassdoor has similar.
It’s also interesting to the hiring bands for each level. I’m sure that not all L3’s are new grads, so lower pay may be influences by degree level (BS, MS, etc), experience (other full time applicants, or college internships).
At least a third of the class at CMU is in this bucket.
Certainly not intended as that, so my apologies. My only point is that salary in many areas are increasing, and available for for competent students who wish to pursue them.
That is a fair point. But the numbers of people making those salaries are higher than what is being contended here. It is not a rare occurrence. It is somewhat common (may be 30%-50%) at the very top schools. And perhaps 10%-20% at schools like Purdue.
Still rare compared to all the students graduating in the country. Is the thread about ROI for CS at top schools? Or about ROI by major of all schools?
For some reason most threads on this site turn into talk of CS, MIT, Stanford, Math competitions, Advanced Math in HS.
Maybe there should be a sub section for CS, like there is for Music?
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