http://www.businessinsider.com/colleges-with-the-highest-starting-salaries-2015-8
Still waiting for the study which takes into account the starting material and measures which colleges might be the best at developing existing potential.
Self reported data is skewed. Collecting data with survey monkey and payscale is limited/
Really not much news here. Basically these are either the super top tier schools, service academies (where everyone has a job in the military upon graduation) or schools with big programs in hire-able majors like engineering, business, computer science etc.
I’m tired of all these survey or rankings. I want CC to give it a rest.
why did the powers that be at CC think this was important enough to put on the home page?
give it a rest CC…
sheesh…
It really makes me wonder if CC has some sort of contract with business insider… I see so many useless links labeled as “hot” with them.
And Dave what’s his name loves posting stories about kids drowning in debt… then you get down to the small print and the article is mainly about how most college kids are managing their loans just fine.
I can think of two different biases making this survey less useful. First, the income is highly related to the field. Comparing a highly engineering focus school like MIT or CalTech to other schools that have a variety of disciplines does not really make sense. Although it is still average income from that school, the samples are very different. Second, it does not consider regional adjustment. A significant number of in state graduates would choose to stay closer to family and public schools have mostly in states students. Certain states just have higher living expenses. Unless the income is region adjusted, it does not make sense to compare a fresh graduate from California to someone from the mid-west.
There’s no way that a graduate of the Military Academy, Naval Academy, or any of the other service academies besides USMMA are making that salary right out of college simply because there’s no way the military pays that well.
I calculated the pay for a newly commissioned academy grad. For single officers at the O-1E grade, it’s over $57k including basic housing and subsistence allowance. They also get another higher housing allowance for areas that are high cost of living There are other pay differentials depending on location and hardship ones. Married grads make more since they get more subsistence and housing allowances. It’s conceivable one can make $80k a year given these variances. Remember these are median estimates. Some make more, some make less.
One of the dirty secrets about the military is that after you’re in a few years, the pay is pretty good, especially for officers.
I’d like to see a ranking of salary by majors. Does an MIT engineering graduate earns more or less than NJIT’s, for example, and by how much? How about Yale’s psych graduates compared to Rutgers’?
If you want to get a good answer then go look at the career survey of each college.
It does not make any sense to have the average salary of all majors.
College graduates have different career goals. Some go to graduate schools, some volunteer to serve the public, some go to work. The only reason that Naval Academy ranks first because it has only one major (military service) and all of its graduates go to work for the US Government.
^^Military academies are accredited colleges and have different majors (engineering, hard science, liberal arts) as other colleges and universities.
^ It has many subjects, I know that. But it has a single career purpose: military service.
Not true for every academy graduate. The obligation for military service is 6 years. After that, many leave for work in the private sector like anybody else. That’s when the degree from the academies will become valuable for its recognition and networking. There are headhunters working for Fortune 500s who go after military officers, especially those from the academies.
You are carrying too far. We are talking about starting salary of college graduates here. Naval Academy graduates don’t need interships, job interviews and all of them have the same starting salary. Easy math.
I always wonder how much of this post graduate success is due to the University attended rather than the connections of wealthier families that were in place long before the student attended the University…
“Wealthy families” don’t necessarily always have jobs to offer, and “wealthy families” don’t stay that way by hiring incompetents. If it were all about that, why would they even bother with college? Who do they have to impress?
However, the wealthier families are more likely to be able to offer post graduation support for an extended job search than a poor family, whose kid may need to take the first offer, even if it is a suboptimal one in both pay and career development.
Also, connections may not get the job, but they may help get the interview.