I agree that the discussion is fairly pointless.
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If your goal was to have Frank Bruniâs career: published author, NYT columnist, runner up for Pulitzer, youâd make one set of choices. If your goal was to have his net worth, reported variously at somewhere between $1 and $10 million, youâd make another set of choices.
There are many ways to accumulate assets by your mid-50s. It can be done with a good but ordinary job with savings and investments. You donât need an elite degree, and you may very well be better off leaving college debt-free, buying your first house in your mid to late 20s, etc. than struggling to pay off loans for an expensive education. It is definitely worth more than youâd get at a large public university, but probably not what you paid for it, unless you have a specific career in mind that expects it.
Bruniâs career is impressive because of his fame and influence. But heâs also had opportunities beyond his control that contributed to getting to this point. Under any circumstances, he still might have succeeded, even as a journalist, but not necessarily with as high a profile. It is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions by making comparisons to a celebrity, even a fairly minor one.
I agree completely. That is why I find his use of himself as an example to extrapolate and advise others to be nothing more then self serving. He canât simply disassociate aspects of his background to suggest they didnât impact his opportunity. Once again agreed he may have wound up in the exact same spot, but providing universal advise centered upon a premise that his advantages didnât have an impact is simply flawed and convenient.
Apologies in advance for re-stirring the pot, Iâm posting this as an update to the data posted by the OP. These are from the updated Payscale salary survey.
The Best Universities For a Bachelorâs Degree
Thatâs a link to the bachelor degrees only pageâŠbut there is a lot of data by major, by state, etc. if you head to the home page.
Either way it would seem advisable to take the full ride Morehead Cain scholarship over full pay at Yale, given that choice. And thatâs even more true if you set your sights lower than Bruni.
But I agree that this has little applicability to the vast majority of students.
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Thank you for posting this link.
CAVEAT: Does not account for regional differences in pay & cost-of-living.
Makes a great attempt at accounting for more lucrative areas of study (percent of STEM majors), but fails to account for schools of communication / theatre / drama which typically result in low paying professions and decrease the overall average pay for a university. (An example would be Northwestern University which places lots of grads in the low cost Midwest US & which has a large School of Communications and does not, unlike UPenn & Babson, have an undergraduate business school.)
Totally understood and agreed. I did find the attempt at âsatisfactionâ or âcontentmentâ data point a nice touchâŠ
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RE: @EyeVeeeâs list:
Regarding #20 Albany School of Pharmacy & Health Sciences is a bit misleading by the STEM percentage of just two (2%) percent (seems like it should be close to 100%).
Also, interesting to know that there is another SMU (#47) Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, California.
For a long time, Morehead-Cain was skewed towards prep schools which is why you see famous alums from prep schools. The school itself has to join the program and then nominate candidates. Many public schools for a long time werenât even a part of the program. Out of a class of 60 at my boys prep school and another 60 at the all girls school next door, a boy and a girl took the Morehead Scholarship offers and attended. Neither has lit the world on fire with success in their fields. Of course UNC is going to tout their most well known alums so itâs no surprise to me who some of them are and their backgrounds. I would believe that in 20-30 years, you will see them touting kids who came from public schools that arenât elite.
I get what you are saying, but if you went to an elite prep school and then your run of the mill state school, and still did well, wouldnât it prove the point that it doesnât matter where you go to COLLEGE? (the OP was referring to prestigious college)
I have mentioned anecdote after anecdote of friends I know who either graduated with me from a prep school and attended prestigious schools, or didnât go to high school with me and went to a prestigious college and still donât believe it mattered to their career path. Our HS college counselor, who is a reader for UCLA admissions, tells kids to not spend a lot of money on undergrad. Spend it wisely on grad school, because it matters more there.
My own DD is off to a much better start in her career than me and she didnât graduate from a prep school (public HS) or go to a Top 25-30 college (ASU) like I did. She is working at an internship for a very well known shoe company. She wisely chose a business major whereas I chose history. I didnât have an opportunity to work for a company like that until I was almost 30, even though I had privileged school degrees working in my favor.
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I think a bigger caveat is the inherent implication that name of school attended is the key driver for salary, and characteristics of individual students attending the colleges has no influence on their average salary.
For example, a comparison of listed stats for Harvard and UMass is below. Harvardâs Early Career salary is listed as 32% higher than UMass, and by mid career it has increased to 41%. So does that mean if a particular highly academically achieving kid with great resources gets rejected from Harvard and attends his safety at UMass, then his salary potential drops by 32-41%? Or might he have some differences from the average student at UMass that influence average salary?
UMass â Early Career = $59k, Mid Career =$105k, % STEM = 24%
Harvard â Early Career = $76k, Mid Career =$148k, % STEM = 19%
Harvard is an extremely selective college with a ~4% admit rate and generally admits amazing students with top stats who show signs that they are expected to thrive in their planned career path⊠far more so than the average student at UMass. Admitted students also tend to come from wealthy and often well connected families with great resources. In contrast, UMass is far less selective and accepts the majority of applicants . UMass students average far lower stats. 1/4 of UMass students fail to graduate. UMass students come from far less wealthy families with less resources than Harvard families on average.
There are also intangibles that influence salary. For example, the D&K study found that after controlling for scores, the higher salary was associated with applying to the highly selective college, not actually attending. Being the type of person who applies to highly selective colleges may be associated with being the type of person who favors certain career paths, is more likely to think nationally rather than locally in employment, comes from a certain type of family background, etc.
One also needs to consider that the salaries are self reported, have small sample size, have inconsistent major distribution and field of study even when STEM percentage is similar, salary expectations vary notably in different fields, in addition to cost of living differences. In short, while I find such stats interesting and reading lists like this can be amusing; itâs not especially relevant for the subject of this thread â âthe payoff for a prestigious college degreeâ.
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I would agree that the thread borders on useless due to the individual aspects of personal situations, but if salary and earnings arenât relevant to a calculation of ROIâŠwhat do you use?
If anything, the stats you point out indicate that there is a larger payout in going to Harvard than indicated by the OPâs data.
Indeed you have shown personal anecdote after anecdote and I respect your individual experience and perspective.
Up thread I provided hard stats that evidenced the disproportionate representation of Ivy/prestige graduates in Fortune 500 CEO roles, at elite graduate schools, for Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships, Presidents of the US, Congress and Supreme Court justices and prestige employers at IB, mgmt consulting, VC etc.
I donât think you need to attend a prestige school to succeed in these areas but there certainly does appear to be an advantage to doing so.
I think we will have to agree to disagree over what are the best types of sources from which to draw broad conclusions. I personally tend to discount anecdotal conversations out of a suspicion that human nature is to tell the friend what they want to hear and spare their feelings.
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But Harvard is only two subway stops from where a lot of the Boston area VCs have relocated to, which is next to MIT. While the VC community in Boston is not nearly as vibrant or imaginative as their west coast counterparts, they have funded a number of successful startups over the years.
I wonder how much that âhigh meaningâ factored into the rankings, because many tech companies like to think theyâre making a difference in a good way, but they really arenât. I could see an Apple employee thinking theyâre in a high meaning role, but really they charge a lot for their product and lock in their customers, thatâs why theyâre the most valuable company. Not exactly getting $20K stipend to work on AIDS and malaria in Africa.
Itâs not the measuring salary thatâs the problem, as stated in the first paragraph the problem is:
âI think a bigger caveat is the inherent implication that name of school attended is the key driver for salary, and characteristics of individual students attending the colleges has no influence on their average salary.â
Iâd favor the D&K study referenced in my post ,which controls for the issues stated above by comparing students who applied to and were accepted to a similar set of colleges. Their regression analysis found that name of school attended did not have a statistically significant impact on salary for non-URMs. However, it did find that individual student characteristics, including having higher stats and being the type of student who applies to highly selective colleges (attending is not required), were associated with a higher salary.
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Who knows. I was looking at it wondering if the finance / econ heavy schools like Wharton and Babson had people who feel like their lives add no value? Itâs all theoryâŠand the data means very little to anyone reading it.
What would be interesting to knowâŠis if for every AIDS stipend and grad school attendee who is happy yet poorâŠdoes their undergrad have a financially successful and miserable foil?
As stated, in several posts, correlation is not causation. Certain college names being overrpresented among outliers does not mean the college name was a key driving force in that representation. It may far more relate to things like the college being extremely selective and admitting some of the most stellar students in the United States, students who apply to certain colleges being more likely to target certain fields of work, students attending certain colleges being more likely to come from wealthy/connected families, etc. However, it also doesnât mean that the college name had zero influence. Instead you need to a different method of evaluating the benefit of attending a prestigious college from looking at overrepresentation in a few rare outlier fields.
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Any insight on how I an unfollow this topic so it stops showing up in my âunreadâ section?
Exactly. It could be as much about the type of students that apply to these schools as it is the influence of the schools themselves.
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I have agreed with you previously and delineated the caveats you suggest. My response was not to âmake the caseâ but to suggest an alternative to the use of personal anecdote to extrapolate upon. Please note for context the content that elicited the response.