<p>im_blue,</p>
<pre><code>Actually they are excellent because they are chosen for their teaching ability and they have been given special funding to spend more time teaching and developing coursework.
This thread has been going off-topic. I think we need to get it back on topic.
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I was talking about your typical middle class kid from Illinois that simply couldn't afford to go to a private school such as Harvey Mudd, Cooper Union (because the cost of living in NY for a year would be more expensive than attending a state school), etc. and are in essence forced to go to UIUC for lack of another option. This student may have to go directly into industry after their BS/MS simply because they need the money. Why spend 4+ years going for a PhD when they could begin their career and earn money that would immediately help them and their family? People aren't always lucky enough to be able to wait those 4 years (even if they get a full scholarship) to simply stay in school. Situations like those will skew the above statistic
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<p>Well, first of all, I would point out that Illinois is clearly not the only place that has people are not rich. In the specific case of Cooper Union, I'm sure nobody would dispute that New York City has PLENTY of people who are not rich. So think about the situation. Let's say you and your family live in NYC. You're not rich. You can either go to SUNY or to CCNY and pay tuition. Or you can go to Cooper Union and pay no tuition. And if you live at home, which you can easily do because of the strong NYC public transportation system, you effectively pay nothing at all to go to Cooper. So what's the better financial deal for those people - SUNY, or Cooper? </p>
<p>Now I can agree with you that perhaps there may still be some skewing of the data in terms of public vs. private in terms of PHD attainment. However, it is still a fair question to compare publics vs. other publics. For example, why can't schools like Illinois compare to the PhD attainment rate of UCSD or New College of South Florida? After all,they are all public schools. I think that's a fair question.</p>
<p>You might also have to ask if it's true that these not-so-rich students at the public schools feel that they have to go to work, then that ought to boost the kinds of salaries that these public school grads get relative to private school grads. Think of it this way. A guy who gets a 3.9 from Berkeley, but is poor, might have to go to work, but that person is clearly at the top of his class so that he will probably get a very good job. A guy with a 3.9 from Harvey Mudd might be going to graduate school instead (because, like you said, he's rich enough to do that). What that would mean is that the grad-schools would be skimming off the cream from the private schools more so than from the public schools. Hence, it would probably be only the low-ranked students from Mudd who would be getting jobs whereas it would be a combination of low-ranked and high-ranked (but poor) students from Berkeley getting jobs, which ought to boost the average salaries obtained by those Berkeley grads. But as you can see from the data, the salaries of the Mudd grads are highly comparable to, and in many cases exceed, the salaries of the Berkeley grads.</p>