<p>A starting salary of 54,300 for a kid coming straight out of college with a degree in the liberal arts is awesome.</p>
<p>What were you expecting? 250,000?</p>
<p>@objobs
If you don’t know that something’s true, you can’t speculate that it IS true. Logically, it would make sense that whatever factors affect Columbia (successful people not answering, lots of students going to grad school, etc.) also affect other schools in equal measure, but that’s NOT NECESSARILY TRUE. Sociological research, unlike mathematics and logic, is not an absolute science. You have to measure every factor and its effect on each element. You can’t just ignore a factor and assume that it will affect every element equally. You have to be sure, or at least make the effort to find out.</p>
<p>While this study is not the best and is flawed in many ways, I would not be surprised if the findings held true, generally speaking.</p>
<p>i wish people in this thread, and in general would stop saying something ‘begs the question.’ partially because not once in this thread is it actually followed with a question, which is idiotic, but mainly because it’s a logical fallacy.</p>
<p>surely you mean ‘raises the question’… right?</p>
<p>I don’t know but this company seems pretty legitimate and they seem to be keen on data integrity. They have a huge sample and they statistically filter anomalies and check them by hand. They add over 300,000 profiles each year for all types of jobs so they have experience, and they’ll know what jobs match up with what salary.</p>
<p>[PayScale</a> Salary Survey Methodology](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/resources_methodology]PayScale”>Gender Pay Gap Report Methodology | Payscale Research)</p>
<p>That said, there are several issues with this survey. First, since it’s a survey, there’s the issue of response rates. This just might show that Columbia grads are, how we say, apathetic to this survey.</p>
<p>Second, there’s the issue that this disregards graduate degrees, which definitely limits its scope. So this survey is really only pertinent for students who don’t get MBA’s or go into law and medicine. However, it includes students entering finance without a postgraduate degree, because the financial services industry (as long as you don’t have an MBA) is included in the survey.</p>
<p>This survey, in my opinion, says that Columbia students who don’t enter into finance, business, law, or medicine (keep in mind that this may be over 50% of the school) make less than their counterparts at other schools. There may be various reasons, but there may be fewer engineers, more history majors, fewer political science majors who may work for think tanks, etc. </p>
<p>I tend to trust the methodology, experience, and integrity of this survey to forecast earnings for students who aren’t pre-professionally oriented. The data looks consistent on the lower end of the scale (schools scattered around the same area) and the big surprise comes from the mid-career earnings. This could just be a structural difference between how non pre-professional students perform. Regardless, it’s just a survey…(insert comment about lack of data consistency)…blah blah blah. Take it for what it’s worth. It’s definitely better than what Columbia publishes which is a whole lotta nothing.</p>
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<p>Yeah, it’s not a matter of necessity. (I acknowledged this in post #20.) But can you stipulate the circumstances under which these factors would disproportionately impact Columbia? I have yet to hear what such a (seemingly counter-factual) situation could possibly look like.</p>
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<p>Wrong .</p>
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<p>love one word answers <3. if you say something ‘begs the question,’ then the statement is assumed true based only on the context of the initial statement. seeing as the op asked why columbia grads earn so little (pointing to a study), that statement is inappropriate in this situation.</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but I thought that to say that something “begs” the question is to suggest that a question which had been raised (implicitly or explicitly) is being avoided. The question to which I am referring is some version of “why these flaws would more adversely affect Columbia than other Ivies.” (Here I was not addressing the OP’s question.) </p>
<p>In the event that I am mistaken in my (single) word usage, thanks for being my personal editor and proofreader. My only regret is that you didn’t point out my spelling and grammatical errors too. Next time, please help a brother out.</p>
<p>not just you. it’s misused multiple times in this thread. begthequestion.info/</p>
<p>ha, maybe i’m asking too much, but i just expect a little more out of prospective and current students of columbia.</p>
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<p>See, that’s it. I am not a Columbia student. In fact, I will be matriculating at a non-Ivy in the fall. God forbid, it is not even east of the Mississippi. Imagine that. So that may explain my lack of impeccability when it comes to word choice. (Note the possible irony in my last statement re: diction.) You’ll just have to adjust your “expectations” accordingly.</p>
<p>That said, I meant “begs the question” the way it is commonly (and colloquially) used. For the sake of understanding, it did not violate the spirit of my argument. But if you feel compelled to keep nitpicking, be my guest.</p>
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<p>Ditto…</p>
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<p>the burden of removing significant compounding factors like what proportion of better students go to grad school, or how poor the average student who doesn’t get a master+ degree is in the first place, or the fact that this is a survey with no verifiability lie on the people making the claim that the survey is worth something. Otherwise it’s just random, i.e. the reason Columbia grads seem to earn so little in the survey could be because it just so happens that the other significant compounding factors adversely affect it, has nothing to do with causation. </p>
<p>here’s what you can conclusively say from the survey:</p>
<p>“columbia students who respond to this survey and claim to not have secondary degrees, claim lower earnings than students who respond to this survey who claim to not have secondary degrees”</p>
<p>I hope you notice how precise the conditions are with claims everywhere, because there is no incentive to be honest at all. I’m glad you see value in a completely unverified survey.</p>
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<p>This still begs…I mean…RAISES the question why these “other significant compounding factors adversely affect” Columbia more than the other Ivies.</p>
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<p>Columbia grads have no more or less incentive to be honest than other Ivy grads.</p>
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<p>It depends on what you mean by “value” and how narrowly or broadly that “value” is defined. But I’m glad that you’re glad.</p>
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<p>actually, you can explain these numbers quite simply. the number of people majoring in liberal arts majors (that, in general earn lower salaries) is most likely disproportionate at columbia vs. the other ivies. what confuses me more is why someone who’s not even going to attend columbia is so concerned about this topic.</p>
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<p>yeah we do. we have to uphold prezbo’s honor. being dishonest would tarnish his reputation.</p>
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<p>Even more likely disproportionate at Columbia than Yale, Brown, et al.? Do you have any evidence to support your claim? If so, does this evidence fully account for the differences in salary?</p>
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<p>Let’s stick to the debate. I don’t care about your confusion. And you shouldn’t care about my “concerns.” Is there a rule that only Columbia students can post in the Columbia forum?</p>
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<p>It’s not apparent in this sub-forum.</p>
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<p>whooo them’s fightin’ words! you ask for evidence, and the fact of the matter is… i’m too lazy to look it up, but i did go to columbia, and i have a fair idea of what a substantial number of my peers studied and ended up doing. fact of the matter is, the study listed gives no more substance than my anecdotal evidence does.</p>
<p>i didn’t realize i was entering a debate. if that’s what this is, i’ll kindly concede, and refrain from arguing with hs students :)</p>
<p>It was nice chatting with you, Joe. Thanks for the heads up about the “begs Q” thing. </p>
<p>But for the record: I am a recent high school GRADUATE. Big difference (to me at least)!! Since you’re an undergraduate alum, you wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a college student, would you? :)</p>
<p>you’re wrong… college is the tits. it makes no difference to me whether or i’m an undergrad or a grad student. no one can tell the difference anyway.</p>
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<p>maybe, maybe not, but you still have not addressed my point about randomness caused by leaving significant compounding variables unaccounted for. </p>
<p>what are we concerned about: how much different colleges increase your earning potential. </p>
<p>yet we are not accounting for at least:</p>
<p>what proportion of better students go to grad school, or how poor the average student who doesn’t get a master+ degree is in the first place, or who responds to the survey in the first place.</p>
<p>this could easily explain away all of the difference in 10 year earnings period, there is just too much left unaccounted for that the survey is pretty worthless.</p>
<p>from this survey the statement columbia grads earn less is dependent on so many assumptions that you might as well just treat it as superstition. On top of that the conclusion we seek is whether columbia causes grads to earn less, which assumes the first conclusion and then a whole bunch of other assumptions - have fun in fantasy land.</p>