Very Interesting report on alumni salaries

College Search & Selection
1

Hey all. I ran across a report on Payscale.com that lists starting salaries and mid career salaries for the alumni of most every college in the nation. I want your opinions on how a couple schools seemingly are punching above their weight and below their weight. Link http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors

Clemson University alumni take home much more pay then I would expect when compared to other schools that I thought were comparable.

Clemson SS/MCS: $51,400/$91,000 (in standard cost of living US dollars: $56,669/$100,327)
UGA: $45,900/$81,500
South Carolina: $43,100/$75,000
UF: $48,800/$85,300
UNC-Chapel Hill: $46,100/$80,400 (definitely not as much as I expected)
NC State: $49,600/$88,000
Penn State: $51,500/$87,100

All of these numbers are higher than I expected (except UNC, UF, and South Carolina) given the fact that cost of living in the South is very low (trust me I moved down here 3 years ago). Clemson grads seem to definitely be cashing out however. CU alumni are in the same salary range as VT, UVA, Wake Forest, and other well-known schools. I just never thought of a Clemson degree as that valuable I suppose. Another shocker is the salaries of UNC alumni. UF also. Surprisingly low.

Another school that takes home more pay is Texas A&M: $54,300/$97,700. UT-Austin alumni bring home less! $52,200/$96,100. Interesting…

One last stat is that a number of well-known schools out in Cali are underperforming I feel (especially considering the high cost of living)
USC: $51,700/$98,000 (in standard cost of living US dollars: $45,790/$86,798)
UCLA: $50,300/$95,900 ($44,550/$84,938)

Obviously not every graduate of a school is going to live and work in that respective school’s home state, but I would think the majority would.

2

Can’t say I have done extensive reading on this but alot of those payscale numbers come up a lot higher than actual college surveys of alumni, up to 10,000 for Texas A&M I read. First I think salary survey data has to be used cautiously. And taking major into account skews results as does elimination of those who went to grad school, the unemployed, likely the underemployed etc. When you look at various colleges, you don’t know what makes one group who logs in and self reports equivalent to another. Payscale’s data is proprietary so we don’t really know what is in it and, more importantly, what is not in it.

3

BrownParent, you raise a good point, but I think if the data PayScale collected was inadequate and/or skewed, salary reports would fluctuate greatly over the years. However, one can see that the salaries reported by many schools stays somewhat constant, if not gradually increasing over time due to inflation. If one school had a large percentage of engineers report their salary data one year, and then the next year a large number of comm majors reported theirs, you would see a drastic difference in data year to year. But this is not the case, leading me to believe that the data is more accurate than not.

4

The PayScale reports have been discussed extensively on CC. Do a search. BrownParent has stated a couple of the often-repeated criticisms: that it is based on self-reported data, and that it excludes (deliberately) the salaries of alumni with advanced degrees.

However, I don’t recall anyone addressing the year-to-year stability of the data before.

5

If we compare the two in-state schools…

Clemson SS/MCS: $51,400/$91,000

South Carolina: $43,100/$75,000

Clemson awards about 30% of it’s degrees to STEM majors, while USC awards a bit less than 20%. Clemson has the state’s large engineering school, while USC’s program is fairly small. A lot of factors can come into play. You could try comparing salaries by major, but then you run into issues with small sampling sizes. It’s interesting data, but I wouldn’t try to project too much into it.

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tk21769, I did not search at all about threads discussing the PS reports simply because I did not think the thread would revolve around the reports, instead on the data I put up. However, now I will try and find some old threads on the reports and what cc thinks of them.

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Approximately 60% of Clemson undergrads are studying business or engineering. Only ~3.5% of UNC undergrads are studying business, and none are studying engineering. What exactly were you expecting?