<p>These comparative salary studies all seem to be based on Payscale data which is at best a very flawed data base. It’s not a systematic, scientifically constructed survey; it’s based entirely on unverified, self-selected reports by individuals. And notice that it reflects Bachelors degree holders only; anyone who has a Masters, Ph.D., M.D., J.D., M.B.A., D.D.S. or any other advanced degree is excluded from the data set. At many schools, that’s going to exclude most of the top earners because their best and brightest tend to go on and earn advanced degrees. At my D1’s LAC, about 80% of the graduates go on to earn advanced degrees, not necessarily straight out of college but at some point in their lives. The 20% who don’t go beyond a Bachelors are certainly not representative of the school as a whole; and frankly, they may tend to skew toward the lower part of the class.</p>
<p>On the other hand, many of the top schools in the Payscale surveys are engineering schools. Not surprising, when you think about it, because engineering is a field where with a Bachelors you can go straight into a comfortable professional job, and many engineers never go beyond a Bachelors because they don’t need to. But no effort is made here to control for occupation or major. So an engineering school that’s entirely or mostly engineers is going to look better in the Payscale ranking than an engineering school that’s part of a larger university. Do we really think Worcester Polytechnicle Institute (WPI) (#13 in the Payscale ROI ranking) engineers earn more money than Cornell (#20) engineers? Or is it that engineers make more money than non-engineers holding only a Bachelors degree, and engineers represent a larger fraction of WPI’s graduates than Cornell’s, given that the latter is a larger and more diverse university? For that matter, it could that right down the line, Cornell engineers earn as much or more than WPI engineers; Cornell business majors make as much or more than WPI business majors; and so on, but WPI still comes out on top because engineering is a higher-paying profession for those holding only a bachelors and WPI has a larger proportion of its grads in engineering. (These are all just hypotheticals, mind you, but I think they illustrate my point). </p>
<p>Kinda dumb basis for comparison, if you ask me.</p>