BTW, @writermom2018 from her previous posts has a disdain for UChicago, so there really isn’t any point to try and convince the OP of anything positive about UChicago.
@CU123 I don’t know if that’s true - the mobility influence is strongly influenced by number of people in the bottom three quintiles because they are the only ones who can move up. At most 30% of Brown students are in the bottom four quintiles, and who knows how many are in the bottom three (only 5% are in the fifth quintile). Since students aren’t becoming very rich in general (though richer than UChicago), the poorest kids aren’t either, so their performance in “Chance a poor student has to become a rich adult” is relatively worse.
I think Brown has been taking rich kids, making them either as rich as they grew up or “poor” (by Ivy League standards, well-off by any one’s standards), and it has been obfuscated by the data: the mobility influence doesn’t say much for them.
Keep in mind this only tracks income - not inherited wealth or assets. You could have trust fund kids content to take a job they like that doesn’t pay very well at Brown. I think this actually does a weirdly good job of capturing student cultures. Consider Princeton, which looks similar to Brown in terms of rich kids and mobility index but are much more ambitious as a group (including the poorest students).
@HydeSnark I agree there is too little data here to discern much at all. This article would have to have much more extensive research and data to really draw any conclusions.
@CU123 I don’t know, I think there is a lot of interesting stuff in here. But like anything else, data should be read with a very critical eye.
@CU123 There is salary data (average incomes at age 34) on the same page. Please be more careful in the future.
Also, the fact that Chicago kids are from the poorest families is a very valid point. Chicago is clearly economically diverse.
Unfortunately, Chicago is still dead last in the “poor students to rich adults” category. Duke and Dartmouth also fair poorly. Princeton and MIT excel.
@JenniferClint Yes, my bad, you are correct but your original post didn’t seem to reference that data.
BTW, can you draw a logical conclusion on why MIT excels? I know I can.
Of course, engineering…
@JenniferClint , remember this data the next time you hear someone argue that Chicago is just like all the other elite schools. Chicago never seems to find a spot in the middle of the pack in any of these metrics. I would refer you also to the lengthy thread entitled “Some interesting stats” which showed Chicago to be a real outlier with respect to some stats that seemed to be measuring social cohesiveness in the student body. While Chicago is certainly “dead last” with respect to its lowest quintile rising to the highest quintile (something one would expect given all the advantages that ivy-league glamor and connections open up to a certain kind of poor kid), note that Chicago is third among twelve on the metric of kids of any quintile moving up two or more quintiles. Are you willing to interpret that as any sort of positive? That’s true social mobility, isn’t it? Is it absolutely necessary to achieve plutocratic grandeur in order to have a successful life?
There are at least three potentially mitigating circumstances when one peer doesn’t post average post-grad salaries as high as those of its academic peers:
- Major/career choice
- Regional differences in cost of living (and salary for the same job...)
- Regional differences in the job market. Some kids don't feel like moving a thousand miles and may settle for something paying markedly less than they could have elsewhere. This piece gets us into human psychology -- contentment, competitiveness, greed and envy to name some.
None of those things points to the school.
Now, if UChicago has similar major distributions as those other schools, that could be detrimental to UChicago’s case (they do not…)… but we’d still have the “personal choice/psych” and job market/COL discrepancies to overcome to be able to say with confidence that UChicago does not provide the same level of career prep or opportunities as its peers.
I would posit that there is a lot to the personal preference/psych thing here: most kids don’t attend UChicago to become rich; they attend UChicago for the (possibly) unparalleled rigor and intellectualism among elite universities. It may well really be a “life of the mind” thing for them.
@marlowe1 Haha, “plutocratic grandeur”! Someone really did go to Chicago 
Yeah, that’s a valid point (mobility as measured by quintiles).
Ironically, the school that is ranked 2nd in the “poor kids to rich adults” category (Princeton) is dead last in the mobility category. Strange.
@prezbucky Not buying the majors argument at all. There are several surveys that look at the proportion of STEM majors and I don’t think Chicago is an outlier. I would be very surprised if the distribution of majors at Chicago is different from the distribution at Yale. If anything, Chicago’s world renowned economics department should attract students who are destined for extremely lucrative careers.
The “personal choice” explanation is somewhat legitimate but I’d like to see some empirical evidence. For instance, what % of Chicago grads go on to get PhDs? How does this compare to the % at peer schools?
The “cost of living” explanation also seems pretty bogus. Northwestern doesn’t appear to be adversely affected. Duke is in the south (a region that has a lower cost of living than the midwest).
None of this is to say that Chicago provides a sub-par education. It just needs to work on this particular aspect. Virtually every great university has shortcomings that it needs to address.
As a Duke alum, I would love for my school to recruit and retain more Nobel level professorial talent. It’s something the university has gradually been getting better at (laureates in 2012 and 2015). Chicago will eventually enter the highest echelon of graduate incomes. It will just take time.
@prezbucky Income of incoming students is another important factor. Richer kids tend to end up richer when they get older - and that is the overall trend shown in the scatter plot across all colleges at the bottom of the page.
@JenniferClint Again, the mobility statistic is being misread. So many of Princeton’s students come from the top quintile there is a hard limit on the percent of students that move up two quintiles. So poor kids that go to Princeton end up rich, but across all students there is not a ton of mobility.
If you look at the scatter plot at the bottom, elite schools follow one trend line except for MIT, Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth. MIT has poorer kids that end up richer and the other three have richer kids that end up poorer than expected. The other ones aren’t interesting at all: their incomes can be almost entirely explained by parental income - though they all seem to do better than the all-colleges trend, except for UChicago.
@HydeSnark Aren’t they adjusting for the “ceiling effect”? If they aren’t, that makes the mobility data essentially worthless.
^ They aren’t making any adjustments. That is a pretty astute observation.
@JenniferClint , don’t forget @HydeSnark 's simple but cogent observation - Chicago kids simply start much lower down than those in the peer schools. They’re handicapped already at the starting line. Add to this those difficult to quantify but very real cultural differences having something to do with Chicago kids having non-materialistic aspirations related to “life of the mind” - and it doesn’t seem hard to me to explain these figures. Of course there are those who will deplore the figures and others who will say that the figures are hopelessly out of date. Those are other debates.
^ I agree with that.
However, if you look at an apples to apples comparison (poor kids at Chicago vs poor kids at Princeton), Chicago is still depicted in an unfavorable light. Duke, Brown and Dartmouth don’t fair much better.
@JenniferClint I don’t know. I don’t think so, in the original paper the only mobility rate they calculate is Q1 → Q5
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf
Isn’t all this data pre-Nondorf? If you looked now, is anyone confident chicago would still be such an outlier? I bet median income of families at Chicago have gone up on average, with more low and high earners, and fewer in the middle. An emphasis on first Gen AND an emphasis on ED seems to generate that.
I can’t imagine the average 34 year old UChicago grad only makes $61k/year?
@BrianBoiler - all this data is old (e.g. taken before 2006, when the school - with Zimmer and Nondorf - accelerated change).
Also, frankly, the median incomes (at age 34) make no sense at many of the ivy plus schools. The median income for a 34 yo Brown grad is $66k? The median income for a 34 yo Yale grad is $76k? A big percentage of Yale grads go on to law school or b school or med school - about 10 years from graduating from those programs, the median is only $76k?
I believe, more likely, that number only includes those that did NOT go on to grad school of some sort. In that case, they are more believable.
One of my other kids started at $78K (at age 22) and wasn’t an Ivy league grad, but then again she’s a chemical engineer so once again major trumps all. I guess is sucks to be a 34 year old Yale grad???
I’m thinking of my cohort, now 30+ years out. I would not be surprised if when we were 10 years out, the median was 61K even adjusted for inflation. I know a few making 1% income but more that are far from that (social worker, professors at state Unis, HS teacher, housewife, and other middle class jobs). They mostly came from middle class families, never had the goal of becoming rich, and seem happy enough with their position. In fact, most of those that did end up doing well financially did so largely by happenstance, not by design.