<p>I just want info for the starting salaries for USC undergraduates. It's a big part of my decision of if I want to go there. Specifically I want to know the starting salary of the Information Technology program and Video Game Design major.
for example CMU has something like this...
Majors</a>, Salaries, and University Statistics-Career and Professional Development Center - Carnegie Mellon University</p>
<p>Salaries depend on the employee, not on the school. Don’t select a school thinking that you are going to get a higher salary by going there. Each job posted by an employer has a pay range and especially for entry level jobs we have a set offer amount for each position we are going to fill.</p>
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<p>That’s bad advice - you can significantly impact your starting salary by choosing the right school. </p>
<p>OP: if USC doesn’t post it online, the only place you can get that information is from their career services department.</p>
<p>As you may be aware the starting salaries in any industry are heavily dependent on the current industry demand, the supply of labor to match it, geographical location, and only to some extent the school from which you graduated. Certain fields such as law, medicine, business, and economics; just to name a few, see a far greater correlation of wages to the institution from which one graduated. Others; like education, sociology, and creative writing see far less. </p>
<p>With all that being said, as a student at USC you will have a foot up in the hiring process, especially where California, and therefore Silicone Valley is concerned. USC is one of the top schools in the country and one of the best in this state. Far as your program of choice, Video Game Design, the school actually outranked MIT for a third straight year in a row. </p>
<p>Will that guarantee a six digit salary within a few years after graduation? Well, now that is a question that no one can honestly answer.</p>
<p>The school from which you graduate with a bachelor’s degree has very little to do with your starting salary nowadays. Although it is true that graduates of top schools have, on average, higher starting salaries than graduates of other schools, I would argue that this occurs because the quality of the graduate is higher than the average graduate.</p>
<p>A motivated student at a decent land-grant state university will see more success than an unmotivated student at a top school, provided all other factors are equal.</p>
<p>The one advantage to the school you go to is the companies that recruit there: top companies recruit at top schools, so you aren’t going to see very many people working for Google who are coming straight out of a small, unknown liberal arts schools. If you don’t go to a name-brand school, you may not be competing for the absolute top jobs. That said, you can still get excellent jobs regardless of where you go to school, and if you are a good employee, you will get raises and promotions.</p>
<p>I would be willing to bet that, among full time, salaried employees who graduated in December, 2010 or May, 2011, USC graduates have a range of $20,000 to $120,000 (base), with a median of $50,000 and a mean of $53,000. Annual bonuses probably range from $0 to $40,000, with a median around $4,000 and a mean of around $6,000. And signing bonuses probably range from $0 to $25,000 with a median around $2,000 and a mean around $3,000.</p>
<p>The point is, depending on your industry, your skills and your motivation, you could earn anywhere from $20,000 or less, up to $200,000 or more. It’s a huge range, and you will probably come down somewhere in the middle. Hopefully you’ll do something you like, since you’ll spend the plurality of your waking hours doing it…</p>
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<p>Salaries are dependent on many factors and school is the primary factor. </p>
<p>If you take a look at two graduates from different schools hired by the same employer in the same position, the salaries will look similar. But that doesn’t mean that school isn’t a factor. </p>
<p>The school you attend is the primary factor in which employers will recruit you after graduation. Employers set salaries depending on how they want to operate in an industry - some are low cost and pay below average. Some differentiate based on the knowledge and capabilities of their employees and pay well above average to get and to retain the best employees. Some are in the middle. </p>
<p>If you attend a higher ranked school, the low-cost firms won’t recruit at your school because they know they can’t compete with the other offers students will have. Similarly, if you choose a lower ranked school, the higher paying employers will not recruit at your school because school ranking is correlated with student capability and those employers can afford the higher ranked schools. Some large companies will recruit at all sorts of schools, for example Accenture. The difference is that at a low tier school they’ll recruit the top students. At a high tier school, they recruit the below average students.</p>
<p>Let’s take a look at the Salary Surveys for schools for a BS in Management / Business Administration: RIT: $39,000, Arizona State: $44,000, Dayton: $48,000, Georgia Tech: $55,000, UC Berkeley: $62,000. That’s a 50% salary increase to go from the bottom school to the top school on that list.</p>
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<p>It also has to do with access to certain companies. You’re a consultant. Tell me how likely it is to get even an interview with BCG from, say, the University of South Florida? How about at Yale?</p>
<p>You are restating my original point. Certain fields have a greater propensity for salary differential given the school one attends, while other fields do not?</p>
<p>Oh okay…Just checking.</p>
<p>Now far as comparing USF with Yale, surely you appreciate the puerility of the side-by-side. The latter is an Ivy League Institution and the former is notable only for consistently high ranking on the Playboy list. You might as well compare a Yugo with a Ferrari. Sure, the contrast works, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of intellectual honesty.</p>
<p>I think a pretty huge part of salary variations between top schools is also the location to which you’re hired. Naturally employers on the coasts will be paying a bit more due to costs of living versus areas in between. I know the stipends I was offered for grad school differed in this way. It generally wasn’t the quality of the program that set the level of stipend, but the cost of living in that area. (I could argue the lowest stipend I was offered was actually the best due to the extremely inexpensive housing/rental market in that area.)</p>
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<p>That kind of restates my point. The top students at a low tier school are probably as qualified for the same jobs as the average students at a high tier school. This is classic correlation/causation. I will grant that if two students are equal in every way, and if you could somehow take a weighted GPA to ensure that course difficulty doesn’t come into play, an employer will take a student from USC, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, etc. over a student from smaller, lower tier schools.</p>
<p>The same logic applies for salary. Even within the top schools, you see a large disparity - students getting double majors and dual degrees typically start out with higher salaries (at Penn, they start out roughly 20-25% higher). But that is absolutely a correlation rather than a causation - students who get two degrees are more motivated, in general, than students who get one, so it is no surprise that they are more highly desired.</p>
<p>If we were talking about law school, then I would absolutely agree that school matters more than anything else. A lawyer from a top firm once told me that in order to get an interview, you needed to be in the top 10% of Villanova or Temple; you needed to be in the graduating class of any top 7 school. But for undergraduate? Name brand is far less important than personal accomplishments, networking ability and GPA.</p>
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<p>I’ve never actually heard of anything like this. In my experience with my friends we didn’t really see anything like that. Could that be a little unique at Penn due to, I imagine, the large number of students that double major in Wharton?</p>
<p>(Since, frankly, the average engineer salary from my school when I graduated was over 60k and the high from my department was around 70k. Most of the double majors actually wound up going to grad school, too, so that wouldn’t have skewed the average salary very much.)</p>
<p>Interesting that all you students know so much about hiring practices. Each new job posting has a budgeted salary number attached to it and it will be filled at that number. We are going to try to find the best person that we can for that job at that budget number. We have a number of schools that we recruit at passed on past experience; where we know that we will likely find people who match our needs. There are adders placed onto the salary ranges for different COL areas across the country. The hiring practices for new grads are pretty straight forward. It is more important that you go to a school where you will do well than one where you will see a base of 5k more. Different jobs have different ranges; you can’t compare a Tech Writer to a CS analyst, they have different pay ranges for a given level, so you need to think about what the range is for your major. Yes there are differences in offer amounts for different schools, a lot of that has to do with where we are going to have the new hire working; if he is in Amarillo the range will be significantly lower than if he’s going to be in San Jose. That has to do with COL, not your school. Many of the “high dollar” school are in high cost areas. Our goal is that at the end of the day there is a balance nationally across all of our employees for a given job range as to there purchasing power and standard of living; I’m going to offer less in Omaha than in San Jose, but you can live in Omaha for less than San Jose.</p>
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<p>I would be careful with statements like that. Not everyone is a student and some have more education, interview experience, and hiring experience than you. </p>
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<p>But where did that number come from? If your company is relatively large, your HR shares data with other HR professionals in the field in a society. From that data, you can see historical salary ranges from the previous year and expected hiring numbers for the next year. Your HR department will set your hiring salary at the 25th percentile, 50th percentile, or 75th percentile (or some other number) based on your position in the market (a high salary employer, average salary employer, etc). Then you go to colleges with those numbers.</p>
<p>Which colleges do you visit? You have a list from a previous year with maybe an addition or subtraction. You go to colleges, interview, make offers, and offers are accepted / rejected. At the end of the hiring season, you look at some indicators (offer / interview, offers accepted / offers made, etc). Schools with low indicators are removed for future years. The most common indicator is offers accepted / offers made. If you’re paying at or below industry average, at a school like MIT you’ll get very little acceptances / offers made. At a low tier school, you’ll get more. So what happens over time? Your list of colleges are filled with low tier schools if you’re a below average salary company or high tier schools if you’re an above average salary company.</p>
<p>So, yes, the school’s quality does affect who recruits there and what salaries they receive.</p>
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<p>It is unique to a few schools with strong business programs and business double majors.</p>
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<p>First, that only happens in a small number of companies that hire thousands of college students per year and need to straddle. Second, I wouldn’t try to compare average students at one school with top students at another schools because of the number of factors that influence it.</p>
<p>Even when a company will hire from a top tier school and a lower tier school keep in mind that they’re not necessarily treating those two students equal. Some companies will offer a different salary to two different schools (such as Accenture). Other companies will give preferential location to top school graduates (you get to work in Chicago instead of rural Mississippi).</p>