This particular point will get a lot of the ROI / anti-liberal arts crowd going. I have all but given up making this point, with the last poster debating me on it essentially calling me a liar.
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My original post listed 3 contributing factors to the high reported average CS salary at Brown â working in a high cost of living area, bad data due to small sample size issues, and individual student characteristics. The only reason why we keep talking about the first contributing factor of location, is you have been focusing on that topic, and each time you comment on my post, I reply to your post. If you want to end the discussion, do not reply to this post, I will not reply to the points listed in your earlier post.
The only reasons weâre still discussing it, in my view, are you: (1) keep badly mangling and mischaracterizing my comments to better enable your responses, and I keep setting the record straight; and (2) seem unwilling or incapable of discussing another way to think about your 1, 2, 3 thesis. I know what I wrote and why I wrote it. You cited it #1 on your list, and I simply asked you a question: doesnât the trend of Brown CS job location also suggest that Brown students are competitive in these competitive markets? Consider that each of those markets is also the location of one or two academic titans in the CS world and little Brown University still breaks in. After about 10,000 words, you still wonât answer.
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I donât doubt that the 3 people you listed had good outcomes, but that does not mean that college name was the primary driver for those outcomes. Instead they may have had equally good or better outcomes had they attended elsewhere. Surveys of larger samples and studies with controls for individual student characteristcs are often more reliable measures than personal anecdotes, which suggest a different conclusion.
I think it is important to separate tech from âeliteâ banking/consulting â different hiring processes that focus on different things. A large portion of tech jobs are in engineering, which tends to have a much flatter salary than CS, with less variation due to individual student characteristics. Some example College Scorecard numbers are below for average salary in engineering by college type and USNWR ranking. T20 means USNWR T20 that are non-Ivies. T50 means USNWR ranked 21 to 50.
----------------- MEDIAN FIRST YEAR EARNINGS BY MAJOR -----------
Major ------------------- Ivies âT20 â T50 Pri - T50 Pub â All
Engineering (All Majors) - $70k â $73k* â $69k â - $67k â $63k
*Not counting MIT EECS since most EECS majors work in CS related positions
This is a tangent, but Iâm kinda curious why SoCal is not listed as where CS grads go to work? I thought SoCal has a vibrant CS culture in the beach communities there.
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I also thought the same, until a CC poster recently mentioned that McKinsey now recruits from 70 (or maybe it was 170) US colleges. Twenty years ago, it probably didnât look beyond the top 10-15.
34% of the recent Wharton MBA class went into consulting/strategy and made a median salary of $165k. About 24% did IB and PE. Incredible salaries.
Thatâs all you get after dropping another $200k on top of the cost of undergraduate education? 
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Really affordable because they saved so much with their big merit awards in undergrad. Many consulting firms are paying for them to get MBAs in exchange for three years of further work before they leave for Director plus jobs in big corporate with stock options.
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Iâm surprised to see so much focus on financial returns. To me and those I know who had kids at these schools the attraction was more on the academic and social side. Rigorous academics, exposure to great faculty, and a bunch of other bright kids to interact with.
The career side was a consideration but not a primary one. For most I know it wasnât so much an expectation that attendance was a golden ticket, but that the range of options was probably greater for graduates. Those fixated on finance careers or those who want to spend their vacations on LinkedIn or networking can do that, and really the sky is the limit for some kids. But even those who take a more leisurely approach will probably do okay. I know kids from these elite schools with not much in the way of summer internships, or just some research jobs, and they did okay in the job search. That latter group might have had more trouble from a public flagship I suppose, but then again all these kids are pretty bright.
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Iâve stated my opinion about these comments many times and donât care to repeat them over and over. Lets look at this a different way. The table below lists location distribution at 3 selective colleges. I did not list names to reduce conflation with other factors, but I will say USNWR ranks all 3 colleges among the top 25 in CS , and none of the 3 are Brown.
What does this location distribution tell you about the relative desirability or quality of the 3 colleges or t heir graduates? What does it tell you about which of the 3 colleges a particular student should favor? Before you say that you didnât say desirability and quality, and want me to talk about something else. I am referring to comments like the following:
âSo assuming that job placement is important, what better indicator of a schoolâs quality than that they consistently place people in the most competitive markets?â
âBrownâs ability to place in those markets is arguably an indication of how good they areâ
âCS grads congregate in Boston, SV and Seattle (and NY for whatever that is worth in the CS world). If Iâm a prospective CS student and I read that, Iâd say âsign me up!ââ
As Iâve stated in earlier posts, I believe that College 2 may offers some advantages for students who want to work in the Seattle area through things like career fair participants and alumni network and similar for Georgia and college 3. However, there is not enough information to draw more general conclusions about quality, desirability, or which college is a particular student should favor, without more information about that student and the colleges. In short, looking at location distribution is not a reliable indicator of these criteria.
College 1
California â 37% (Mostly SV)
New York â 27% (Mostly NYC)
Washington â 12% (Mostly Seattle)
Other States â 4% or less (Many states have ~3% or ~4%)
College 2
Washington â 87% (Mostly Seattle)
California â 7% (Mostly SV)
Other States â 2% or less
College 3
Georgia â 76%
New Jersey â 7%
Virginia â 6%
Florida â 6%
Other States â Low
So when In doubt (all things being equal) my first criteria would be the one whose graduates garner the highest salaries and my second criteria would be based on the desirability of the students in multiple geographies as a proxy for marketability.
I will use a finance analogy. Yes a UF student may be able to get a local job for Raymond James in florida that from a cost of living standpoint looks competitive relative to a starting Manhattan based opportunity at Goldman. Over time however the students that are drawn, successfully compete for and or are recruited to the major hubs at the higher starting salaries see their compensation and career opportunities out far pace cost of living adjust. Schools that provide that âaccessâ are the ones I would choose.
If nothing else a broad geographic alumni network beyond the schools location is valuable.
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I work in tech and live in SoCal, and work with CS grads most days of the week. There are plenty of CS grads who want to work in SoCal and do so. Working in SoCal is particularly common among grads from USC, USCD, SDSU, area Cal States, etc. I attended Stanford, which also has s decent number of alumni at various area companies. Qualcomm is SDâs largest tech employer. According to LinkedIn, Qualcomm has the most software engineers who are alumni from the following colleges.
- UCSD (Qualcomm was founded by a USCD professor as is well integrated with the college)
- SDSU
- USC
- UT Austin
- Visvesvaraya (India)
I love CC where HS kids (and/or their parents) can already predict that little Johnnie or Susie (who has never taken a finance course) is going to be -
A- interested in finance
B- competent enough in finance to compete for and land a job in finance
C- be in a position to decide âdo I start my career in a small city at a regional firm, or do I take my shot at a top bank in a major marketâ.
Career planning is rarely so algorithmic, although I understand that nervous parents want it to be so. âIf I spring for JHU instead of U Maryland, will my rate of return exceed that of my very fine instate option by year 5? year 10?â
Do you know how many recent college grads I interview who were gung ho on a career path until they got to college and decided that they either hated the field, or still loved it, but werenât good at it? Do you know how many middle aged candidates I interview who have done a career pivot midway because after 10+ years gunning for âthe perfect jobâ they discovered that they hated their perfect job?
I agree with Polite person that looking at ROI in financial terms is a mistake. I get that itâs a lot of money (really I do- even my in-state flagship costs a ton, and the wise elders made a strategic decision to locate the main campus in a rural part of the state which is not commutable from the major population centers which makes it even MORE expensive- a paradox for sure). But this fixation on CS as the be-all and end-all of academic achievement ignores SO many facts about the labor market. Do you know who took it on the chin in the recession in 2001? CS. Do you know who took it on the chin during the recession in the mid-90âs? Engineers- mostly aerospace, and CS. Any of you old enough to remember the jokes about PhDâs in math driving taxi cabs back in the 70âs? Well those cab drivers got jobs at the dawn of the hedge fund/PE age, and gave their keys over to the CS folks.
There are tens of thousands of people- relatively young college grads with CS degrees- who end up in jobs that the industry considers âIT supportâ. Which is fine- those jobs pay a living wage (until they get outsourced to Mumbai), but they are emphatically not the kind of jobs yâall are posting about which are paying the big bucks in SV. Mom and dad get bragging rights- junior majored in CS, had no trouble getting a job, had multiple offers. Which was true. Move to Charlotte for an IT job with Bank A, move to Salt Lake for an IT job with credit card company B, move to Atlanta for an IT job with a major transportation/logistics company.
Even for CS- where the belief is that anybody with half a brain can get a fabulous job right out of undergrad- there is a definite pecking order.
I wonât touch bio/medicine/health care, since there are many more savvy posters than I, both the med school application piece and the dismal job prospects for bio grads with just a BS. But the conventional wisdom on CC- attend the cheapest college you can as a premed to save your dough for med school- assumes that every 17 year old who wants to become a physician is going to be able to. And that is not true, not even close. And sometimes the cheapest option- which would make sense if indeed the kid ends up in med school- is the option which provides the worst opportunities for the kid who doesnât get in to med school and needs support from career services to figure out plan B.
My point? Itâs a lot more nuanced than this thread suggests. And ROI- youâre going to predict the career path of your teenager?
I
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No, you really havenât. Youâve danced around it, are doing so again now, refusing to respond to a very simple question, and now you ask me to read three more pages of you talking around it. Ok, so what is it now? Do you want to make the point that local good CS institutions are going to place a lot of people locally? Hardly surprising. Iâm sure mystery college #2 offers all kinds of advantages. Where, precisely, did I say that a kid choosing among CS programs should pick Brown over the University of Washington? I didnât and wouldnât.
But how does that relate to Brownâs success placing people not only in their relatively local (and competitive) geographical markets, but also in markets more than 3,000 miles away from them. And in each of these markets, there are local schools that are big players in academic CS: Cal and Stanford in the Bay Area, and the University of Washington in Seattle.
Iâm astonished you were able to write that. My comments have been consistent and Iâve asked you a simple question to which youâve yet to give a straight answer, while doing nothing but talking about something else.
Whatâs going on here, IMO, is youâre defending to the death your 1, 2, 3 thesis and, at least as it relates to me, you donât have to because Iâve not attacked it. Frankly, I barely understand what youâre writing in #2, and #3 seems to be about this crazy notion that people think the school name drives salary, when I donât see anybody (much less me) making such an absurd claim. But as to #1, all I did was point out that at least three of the markets you cited also happen to be, for a variety of reasons, three of the most competitive. Given that, which I think is indisputable, I score that as a positive for Brown CS. The fact that local schools place a lot of students in those same markets is hardly thought-provoking.
Weâre really not getting anywhere, so as long as you donât once again misrepresent my comments Iâm happy to leave this one alone. I think Brownâs going to be ok.
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This is all really spot on.
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You make a good point here. If you compared first year salaries to the top law firms in Seattle to the top Wall Street firms (say, a Cravath), you might conclude the Seattle lawyer is getting a better deal.
But assuming both lawyers make it to partnership (a HUGE assumption at Cravath), it wonât be close even with Manhattanâs COL.
Now, admittedly making partner at Cravath is terribly difficult. But just looking at the economics of the first few years would be missing something.
This goes right back to my point about using outliers to prove a point. And law school? This thread is about undergrad. Law school is a very different calculus. And using Cravath as your example? Come on.
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Itâs really not that different. The same principles apply.
It was a response to one post and one narrow point using perfectly analogous examples: a local financial institution and its Manhattan location relative to starting pay and COL. No need to get excited. And itâs not about proving a point. Itâs about another way to think about starting salaries and COL.
Your original response to my post on this topic contained with 5 questions among a good amount of comments and discussion â not just 1 very simple question. Youâve added various questions beyond this throughout the thread. Ignoring that, in your post from earlier today, you asked " doesnât the trend of Brown CS job location also suggest that Brown students are competitive in these competitive markets?"
Yes, it is correct that employees are usually competitive for being hired at the companies that hired them. However, my opinion and a more meaningful and less obvious response requires going beyond a simple one sentence answer, as I have in previous posts.
For example, as Iâve stated in the thread, CS employers tend to focus on being well qualified to be successful on the job based on relevant work experience and skill set, rather than name of college attended. A particular Brown grad will be competitive for some CS positions based on this criteria and not competitive for others â both at jobs in the listed cities and jobs in other cities. Similarly there is not a simple division like Boston is competitive market, but SD is not a competitive market. They are highly selective/desirable and well compensated CS jobs in both cities, as well as jobs that are less selective/desirable. I could go on and repeat previous posts, but I expect you get the idea.
The post you replied to above didnât mention anything about the 3 contributing factors I originally listed about Brownâs reported higher salary in College Scorecard. This tangent has had little comments about anything other than location (#1), so the other criteria was certainly not âdefended to death.â
#2 was College Scorecardâs small sample of only ~20 federal FA recipients was not reflective of the actual long term average. I have no idea if you dispute this or not since we have not discussed it in later post and certainly have not defended it to death.
#3 was individual student characteristics influence salary. For example, a college with a high concentration of gifted and high quality students might be more likely to ace the competitive tech interview that is common for CS positions. Those same highly competitive and gifted students would also be more likely than average to ace the interview had they attended a different college. To control for this type of student characteristics, one might do something like compare salary for students with a particular SAT score who attended Brown to students with that same SAT score who attended elsewhere, rather than just note that average salary at Brown is higher than average salary at a less selective college, with a lower concentration of quality students.
Coming from a wealthy and well resourced background can also be influential for high salary employment (Chetty study found Brown was Ivy with wealthiest average student body). I mentioned that when these individual student characteristics are controlled for, the conclusion is very different. An example is the previously referenced D&K study, which was discussed in the post. It found no significant difference in salary between grads of more and less selective colleges, after controlling for student characteristics by looking at students accepted to a similar set of colleges who chose the more or less selective ones. URMs and to a lesser extend first gen may be exceptions that had statistically significant effects. This probably sounds new because again we havenât been talking about it or âdefending it to death.â