@much2learn My formatting left much to be desired, so to clarify, the $49,200 you mention is the early career salary for Penn Humanities Majors, not CS Majors.
It should be compared with $56,200 for Tufts Humanities Majors.
It becomes relevant when we are trying to understand the salaries at the school level.
The category just above Humanities Majors is for CS Majors, and unfortunately, none of the schools had a large enough sample size to be listed. The significance of this is that College Factual uses Payscale’s data for it’s CS ranking.
This means the College Factual ranking you posted cannot be trusted.
So, for CS the only valid data we have is the Penn data you provided and the Tufts data I provided which is
Penn $95,000 average, $135 max
Tufts $90,000 average, $130 max (but a few years older and trends have been upward)
Harvard - no data
As a cross check we can sort the schools in the Payscale CS subject ranking by early career salary and compare the top schools to Tufts and Penn. The top 5 are:
Columbia $98,900
Cal $96,400
Stanford $96,200
MIT $95,000
CMU $89,400
Note that Payscale uses the median salary rather than the average salary (used for Tufts and Penn).
All the salaries listed are within about plus or minus 5% of $95,000 and Tufts could range anywhere from near the bottom to the top of the range depending on the correction factor one applies to adjust for the age of the data.
"@much2learn - I don’t mean to disrespect or dismiss your opinions, but we agreed that we were going to follow the engineer’s/scientists credo:
“In God we trust, all others must supply data.”"
@Mastadon Oh big tooth, you make me smile. Data is meaningless, if it not good data. Here is the Penn salary survey for Arts and Sciences http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/FINAL_REPORT_COMBINED.pdf
The report shows the current average salary for Penn Arts and Sciences grads is $60,600. The number is $56,100, if you exclude all Arts and Sciences students with dual degrees.
@mastadon “Also, please remember that this is a Tufts message board, so we are motivated by the quest for “truth and enlightenment”, not “prestige”…”
I am interested in real opportunities. That is not prestige. There is a big difference.
@mastadon “Lastly, we pride ourselves in being independent, “out of the box” thinkers, so doing something just because everybody else is doing it makes no sense.”"
Sometimes there is a reason why others are making a different decision. Understanding what is driving their decisions before making a different decision yourself is often worthwhile.
Tufts may be the best option for the OP, but that decision has an opportunity cost that is worth understanding, and comparing to the benefits to make an informed decision.
Pretending the opportunity cost does not exist is neither independent thinking or nor truthful.
I find the salary numbers to be of limited value in making a matriculation decision. This data is not a great prognosticator for OP’s unique situation so many years from now, when a lot of changes are guaranteed to have taken place. Maybe IR or CS is still in the cards, maybe something else. In fact, I think that the OP put her/his finger on the “quality of life” issues in post #1 that are most relevant in making the decision: “The students were super friendly and I saw in them who I want to be while in college. Great food (seriously guys check out Dewick’s food!) and a beautiful campus too. I also loved the personal and intimate feel on campus and the general student vibe.”
If it were me, I would sign with Tufts unless I could say this all the more confidently about one of those other schools.
Just saying, @just123098
The data you presented is interesting, but one needs to be careful in interpreting it because “Arts and Sciences” is not the same as “Humanities”
If you remove the dual engineering, business and nursing degrees, then the $56,100 Penn “Arts and Sciences” data corresponds to aggregating the data from all of the following Payscale Majors:
Arts - no data
Humanities $49,000
Health Sciences -no data
Math - no data
Physical Sciences - no data
Social Sciences $58,400
The Payscale “early career” data covers years 0-5 after graduation.
The Penn Data is only one year.
The Penn data has also jumped dramatically ($7000) in the last year - which is interesting…
If we average the last 5 years of Penn data, the $56,100 turns into $53,600
If we average the Payscale data we have, (which represents the two largest majors -humanities and social sciences)
we end up with $53,700
So, once we extract the meaning from the latest data you provided, it is pretty consistent with the Payscale data and therefore does not refute it.
So, in summary, the only data that was found not to be good so far was the College Factual data that you provided.
With regard to the College Scorecard data, the salaries tend to track the mix of majors pretty closely, with the schools that have a high mix of professions registering higher early career salaries, but the schools with a higher mix of the arts tend to gain ground (or in some cases surpass) more professions oriented schools by mid career.
The one exception is Harvard, which seems to be higher than one would expect.
If one digs further, though one finds out that the salary database for College Scorecard is derived from the government’s college loan database - but wait - Harvard has a no-loan policy for financial aid…
If one digs into the financial aid section of the College Scorecard data one finds that only 3% of Harvard Students have US Government issued student loans. Harvard should be commended for this, but in the context of this discussion it makes for a rather small sample size that compounds the error/bias inherent in the sampling method associated with the loan database.
So the other piece of data that we cannot trust is the College Scorecard salary data for Harvard.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-University
Funny you mention that, today’s CNN site has a remarkable story of a young man who turned down both Columbia and Stanford to attend Morehouse College and graduated as the first Caucasian valedictorian. True he didn’t turn down Harvard, but people do often have reasons for their choices that transcend a predictable model.
We looked at computer science salaries
We looked at computer science employers
Now we can look at undergraduate computer science research
For industry sponsored research awards (last 5 yrs of Computing Research Association):
Tufts has a larger number of awards than Harvard and double the percentage
Penn has less than half the awards of Tufts and a quarter of the percentage
For academic research fellowships (last 7 yrs of NSF awards)
Tufts and Harvard flip flop and Harvard has double the percentage of Tufts
Penn has one more award than Tufts, but a lower percentage
Computing Research Association Awards Sponsored by Microsoft & Mitsubishi (5 yrs)
…School…#Awards,Weighted…% Class…Grad Rank
NR…UPenn…3…5…0.5,19
NSF Research Fellowships for graduate study (7yrs)
…# of…# of…Average
…School…Awards…Grads…%Class
1…MIT…40…283…2.0%
2…Prince…32…117…3.9%
3…CTech…15…60…3.6%
4…Olin…8…38…3.0%
5…Yale…10…51…2.8%
6…Mudd…13…78…2.4%
7…Harv…14…96…2.1%
8…Colum…15…126…1.7%
9…NW…6…52…1.6%
10.UCB…32…286…1.6%
11.Stan…23…217…1.5%
12.Rice…7…70…1.4%
13.CMU…19…211…1.3%
14.UVA…10…115…1.2%
15.Duke…5…68…1.1%
16.Tufts…6…83…1.0%
17.Cornell…15…213…1.0%
18.GTech …19…288…0.9%
19.UWash…20…357…0.8%
20.UPenn…7…127…0.8%
In terms of recent, relevant opportunities for the combination of CS and IR:
This may be the only Hackathon that spans the boundary between CS and IR. It is sponsored by Tufts, MIT and Harvard and hosted at Tufts. Anybody is welcome, but it is most convenient for for those schools because they are only a couple of miles apart.
http://idhack.developersfordevelopment.org/
Herbert Lin of Stanford was an invited speaker for the CS Colloquium a few months ago. He spoke on Cyber Policy (which is at the intersection of CS and IR) and then talked about the graduate research opportunities at Stanford in that area.
Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy sponsored a conference on Political Risk/Cyber Security which spans IR and CS
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Calendar/2016/03/05/Conference-on-Managing-Political-Risk.aspx
Harvard has a high yield, but the notion that nobody turns down Harvard is fascinating…
One needs to remember that 44% of Tufts class is admitted early decision and there are plenty of RD applicants that “turned down” Harvard by not applying.
Based on Parchment matchup data we get the following for winning head to head competition vs Harvard:
Yale 41% 35-46% (for 95% confidence interval)
Penn 22% 17-28%
Princeton 20% 16-25%
Tufts 15% 7-21%
Brown 14% 9-18%
Columbia 11% 7-15%
Cornell 7% 3-10%
Dartmouth 5% 2-7%
It is challenging to attach any meaning to these numbers because it is hard to know the attributes of the sample populations. The results can be a function of financial aid packages and will vary by major. Penn’s relatively strong showing is probably the result of Wharton (which does not factor into the OP’s situation).
The results can also vary year to year depending on the attributes of the sample of the population that happen to be accepted at competing schools each year.
Based on the tournament model of head to head competitions in 2016:
Penn ranked 5th (it has recently been ranked as low as #10)
Harvard ranked 23rd (it has recently been ranked as high as #1)
Tufts ranked 25th (it has recently been ranked as high as #13)
One must also remember that the aspects of the Harvard stereotype (whether true or not) that make the candidate appealing as a lawyer can just as easily make the candidate unappealing in a tech environment that puts a priority on maintaining a cooperative, team based culture.
It is also important to remember that if one is not comfortable with the Harvard environment, then it is unlikely that one is going to be comfortable working in a company environment that shows deference in its hiring practices to Harvard alums…
Likewise for the Tufts environment or that of any other college.
This is an interesting (one sided) conversation, but I have to disagree with @Mastadon- in the world of Silicon Valley, pedigree (prestige) rules:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-startup-connections-insight-idUSBRE98B15U20130912
(no mention whether the educational background referred to graduate or undergraduate, or if they were CS majors)
Yes it’s a small sample size, but it is pretty clear to me that a Harvard degree will open more doors than one from Tufts. That’s not to say that Harvard CS grads are better equipped or more successful. I have worked with many Harvard and MIT CS grads, and know a couple Tufts CS grads. If anything, the Harvard CS grads are the least entrepreneurial and in some ways least impressive of the group.
Regardless, to the OP: sounds like you should go to Tufts. Harvard will help you later in life, but you could be pretty miserable there. It happens.
I think you might be mistaking correlation for causation.
Thank you all for your inputs! I finally decided to enroll at Tufts!!! Ultimately, Tufts was the perfect fit for me, and although it was hard to turn down the other great options I had, I couldn’t be happier about my decision to choose Tufts. Go Jumbos!
Congratulations 
As a fellow freshman, I’ll see you in the fall!
Congratulations and welcome to the Tufts community!
Congratulations on making your decision!!!