<ol>
<li>Engineering school grads do very well salary-wise as seen by HMC, MIT and Caltech.</li>
<li>Dartmouth might be the best Ivy to get the most bang for your buck even over HYP and Wharton.</li>
<li>Does anyone know why Colgate and Bucknell perform so well? I think Williams should be at the very top of the list since its extremely well-represented in the finance world.</li>
</ol>
<p>Pay scale doesn’t include grads with Law. Med and MBA degrees so what is actually impressive is that the small residual of Ivy grads (the lower 30% who didn’t pursue the law,med and mba degrees the other 70% did, some uncharitably might call them the “ivy losers”) who are in this survey do so well.</p>
<p>And since this is a survey essentially of engineering degrees, it points to the relatively paltry opportunity that the engineeering career is. Any medical specialist will make at least $200k to start and any lawyer at a 100+ attorney law firm will make over $150k to start, -figures which are well beyond this mid-career listing. It also points to the strength of the Dartmouth Thayer engineering school.</p>
<p>^Your analysis is way off toast eater. Investment bankers don’t need to go to business school if they start out as analysts right out of undergrad. They just progress upwards until they become VP/MDs or they jump into other lucrative fields like PE/HF/VC.</p>
<p>The Ivy grads represented in this survey ARE NOT PRIMARILY engineering students and in fact are the finance types that are set for life right out of undergrad. There are countless of Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth grads making six figures 10 years out of college WHO NEVER GOT THEIR MBA.</p>
<p>Payscale can’t incorporate professional degrees in this salary report since that would emphasize the value of the terminal degree, which would be the leading factor that contributes to the jobs that people who pursue additional schooling get. Payscale is trying to ISOLATE the value of the UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE with this ranking and this is the best way to do this.</p>
<p>Until they conduct their first actual scientific survey this is just so much bird cage liner. Do they even adjust for COL in different areas? Is the sample verified and random (NO) It takes way more to live decently in NYC than Kansas City–like double at least. Pay is somewhat reflective of that.</p>
<p>toast eater - This is not primarily regarding engineering. Dartmouth engineering, at the under grad level, is no better, probably no worse, than say Princeton, Georgia Tech, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford etc.</p>
<p>lesdiablesbleus - Yes. There are people who can skip the MBA step. However, those are the exception, not the norm. With so many people surveyed by this, I would assume most of the people are not serious about career and/or didn’t do so well (people who decided to take an easy job to enjoy life, housewives, professional/grad school dropout, etc.).</p>
I’m don’t think I’ve ever seen published the % of Ivy grads who pursue those three professional degrees (MD, MBA, JD) – where can I find that, or where did you get your figure? I had always thought that figure might be around 40%, but that is only a wild guess. I am curious.</p>
<p>I agree with what you say but would, however, change the appellation from “prestige hounds” to prestige ‘whores’. Hounds evokes images of the hunt, where hounds chase down and tear apart their prey. Hounds don’t WANT prestige they want to kill it!</p>
<p>Whores, on the other hand, well… what WON"T they do to get it?!</p>
<p>I agree with barrons, the results from payscale are no better than bird cage liner.</p>
<p>One problem is their methodology</p>
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<p>So they are asking people what their compensation packages with no verification. If I was filling out one of their surveys, and I don’t know why I would, I’d give my best guess of the numbers. I might be way off. Payscale publishes their list with no acknowledgment of what their margin of error is. With such sloppy data collection it is huge.</p>
<p>Payscale can’t incorporate professional degrees in this salary report since that would emphasize the value of the terminal degree, which would be the leading factor that contributes to the jobs that people who pursue additional schooling get. Payscale is trying to ISOLATE the value of the UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE with this ranking and this is the best way to do this</p>
<p>Agree. And since most graduates of top schools pursue MD, JD and MBA degrees, this is really a meaningless exercise for payscale to attempt since the universe being measured has been so completely downsized, and is completely out of sync with the careers of most top graduates.</p>
– crazy high, or crazy low? (that is, that 40% of Ivy alumni ultimately get a JD, MBA, or MD degree)</p>
<p>I did some quick math on UCLA’s graduating classes for Medicine (400), Business (360), and Law (320), compared to the Undergraduate graduating class (6000). At UCLA anyway, the professional degree graduating classes are at about 18% of the undergrad graduating classes.</p>
<p>For toast eater to write that 70% of Ivy grads end up with one of these three Professional degrees just struck me as hyper inflated and based on… what?</p>
<p>Now that I’m rethinking this, I would downgrade my initial guess and now educatedly guess that about 25-30% of Ivy grads attain one of these three degrees – a significant difference from the 70% that toast eater posted so authoritatively.</p>
<p>The other table in Post 11 is also just as much rubbish. It’s not any where near a comprehensive list. All the service academies would have an infinite ROI (no cost with an expected income afterward).</p>
that’s the primary problem with this analysis.</p>
<p>The Krueger-Dale study indicates that CONTROLLING FOR APTITUDE, the difference between a HYPSM alum and say, UC Santa Barbara (Top 50 public as an example) is 2% earnings over 25 years for the student ACCEPTED TO ONE but MATRICULATING to the other.</p>
<p>2%.</p>
<p>The cream will rise no matter which college a high achieving high schooler chooses to attend. </p>
<p>GIGO, or better put, Quality In, Quality Out. The school itself has little or no financially relevant tranforming power. The earnings delta at 2% suggests the financial value of the more more prestigious school is minimal. The study does not measure other positive effects of attending a tippy top university – just financial.</p>
Why are you grouping MBAs with JDs and MDs? You’re comparing a Master’s degree to Doctoral degrees. It is much more difficult to earn the latter two than the former. Worse than that, a Master’s in Business Administration is literally the least prestigious Master’s possible. ITT Tech offers MBAs. </p>
<p>Your 40% holds little significance if it were to include them.</p>
<p>
Why all the math? According to Wikipedia, UCLA has 11548 postgraduates and 38476 students. That’s 30%.</p>
<p>The problem, however, is that its a mistake to assume all UCLA undergrads go on to UCLA grad school. The fact is the matter is that most don’t. There are far fewer grad schools out there than undergrad schools. Many students from colleges or universities who don’t offer a graduate degree in their field are forced to come to UCLA (or a small pool of other large universities).</p>
<p>According to a chart I downloaded from Yale’s undergraduate career services offices three years ago, the number of Yale graduates who matriculated at a law school that year was about 18% of the number of people who graduated from Yale that year. (Most of the matriculants didn’t go straight from college to law school.)</p>
<p>The comparable percentage for Stanford the following year was about 14%.</p>