Thanks @Lindagaf but I was fine sharing his profession.
Additionally, when I applied to colleges I was accepted at both Bentley and Babson, both very good business programs.
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Yes!
This is fascinating. I changed the sorting order of the link for Best Colleges by Salary Potential. I rearranged it by Most High Meaning to Least. High Meaning means “alumni who say their work makes the world a better place.” Best Universities and Colleges | Payscale
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Bellin College, https://www.bellincollege.edu/ where the mid career salary is $100,400 and comes in at #1, with 97% of students saying their work makes the world a better place. AND the percentage of STEM degrees is 0! So how are grads at Bellin College making money? Health care.
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The average school janitor salary in Massachusetts is around $40,000.
Every school event after hours requires a janitor present, including weekends. With overtime included many janitors here make $80,000+.
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Keep in mind the data came from the federal government on students who received federal financial aid. For these students (and their families), upward economic mobility should be among the highest priorities. The Chetty study using IRS data from about 10 years ago also reached pretty much the same conclusion that the odds of a student from the bottom 20% of the family income bracket reaching the top 20% was highest among a similar group of colleges.
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The top 12 from the Chetty study are below (I skipped one that appears to be mislabeled). It’s similar in that colleges with a large portion of students in fields associated with higher incomes do well, as do selective colleges with a large portion of high achieving students who often seek and succeed in fields associated with higher incomes. CMC seems to be an outlier, which I suspect relates a small sample size of ~15 bottom quintile income students per class. Bottom quintile income students at CMC had higher median adult incomes than top quintile income students.
Portion of Low Income Students Who Became High Income Adults
- St Louis Pharmacy – 92%
- MAC Pharmacy – 91%
- Albany Pharmacy – 85%
- CA Maritime - 85%
- Rose-Hulman Tech – 78%
- Kettering Tech – 75% (in Michigan, not Kettering College)
- Harvey Mudd – 74%
- Claremont McKenna – 68%
- Babson – 68%
- Worcester Polytech – 67%
- MIT – 66%
- Caltech – 66%
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Perhaps an engineer or a former math major might name this list “Colleges in high cost of living areas that have good engineering, CS, or business programs”. This might not however sell as many subscriptions.
Then they would wonder why MIT did not make the list. A quick Google search shows a median ten-year-after-graduation salary from MIT as $142,000 which beats everything on the list (but might be more recent data). [OOps, I missed it. Yes, MIT is on the list.}
Maritime academies are also missing from the list. As one example ten years after graduation Maine Maritime Academy graduates average just over $100,000 per year, which is pretty good for a relatively low cost of living area.
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if $$ is what this list is about, annual salaries may be a great global statistical measure, but they don’t respect either total income, nor wealth.
the single most global source of wealth is marriage, and the single largest source of income is capital gains from equity, neither of which appear in the survey
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If your student is willing to hop off the “You must go to college!” bandwagon, move to my school district. We have a vocational campus that serves the county and is funded with the public schools. It focuses not on construction trades, but on skilled manufacturing certifications in mechtronics, CNC machine operation, programming and machine operators. Students go half time to their normal high school, and half time to the vocational campus, and they graduate in five years with a diploma and certification. During an info meeting the head of the program described machinists who were earning over $100k/year just a year or two out of the program, so at age 20 the graduates had no debt and were earning as much as students in the attached article were ten years after graduating undergrad, often with sizeable debt.
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That’s weird, I would have thought health care counted as STEM.
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If you mean the list in the original post, MIT was ranked #2 at $111k. In addition to the $111k overall median, CollegeScorecard also shows earnings by major, which has more variability. For example:
Earnings 3 Years Out (College Scorecard)
MIT CS Major – $163k
MIT Mech Eng Major – $89k
MIT Biology Major – $56k (only includes students who do not enter grad/med school)
My apologies, I missed it. I am surprised that CS is that much higher than Mechanical Engineering.
Another listing has them closer in salary (with CS still ahead of mechanical engineering):
That’s the same CollegeScorecard source, but for an older year. As I recall CollegeScorecard used to report earlier than 3 years out, which also contributes to the increase. CS had a larger increase than Mech Eng since the time of the older sample. A comparison is below:
MIT CS Majors: $118k → $163k (38% increase)
MIT Mech Eng Majors: $75k → $89k (19% increase)
This degree of difference between CS and Mech Eng is not uncommon at highly selective colleges that have a large portion of CS grads working in Silicon Valley, but relatively few Mech Eng grads. For example, CollegeScorecard reports the following for Cornell:
Cornell CS Majors: $116k → $158k (36% increase)
Cornell Mech Eng Majors: $73k → $82k (12% increase)
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What happens when AI replaces humans across all of these majors?
It’s already happening. Bots and AI. Research analysts on Wall Street etc. already being replaced overseas. Can be replaced by AI too.
And so much more.
So in your view, does that mean there will be huge unemployment in the future, most jobs being replaced by Al and robots?
Well society has a way of adapting so hopefully that will continue. But jobs have been replaced by technology. People have to reinvent themselves.
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Is it the college or the major? - Mostly major, along with a location factor. Grads taking jobs in high cost of living areas (often for tech jobs) will have higher salaries…. but they won’t necessarily live better.
Per question above, STEM = Science / Technology/ Engineering / Mathematics. Typically it does not include healthcare, although I suppose Science can be a pre-med major.
The CIP codes for majors with federal definition of STEM are listed at https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stemList2022.pdf . The federal definition of STEM doesn’t include nursing (51.38*), pre-medical studies (51.1102), or many health professions majors (51.*). It does include biology majors (26…), which are the most common major choice among pre-med students. Belin College only has 3 active majors – Nursing (84%), Radiologic Sciences (10%), and Sonography (6%). None of these are on the STEM list above. STEM is not the same as high income. For example, biology is the most common STEM major, yet biology majors are associated with relatively lower income, with only a bachelors.
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Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, and to skew Bentley’s numbers but my BIL graduated from there and has not amounted to anything, career-wise. My husband and his whole immediate family have financially supported him since graduating from Bentley and continue to do so today (I went to his graduation - Elizabeth Dole was the commencement speaker).
YMMV
Because it doesn’t exist? 