<p>@2018RiceParent:</p>
<p>Comparing Mines and CU would not work at all because of the vast differences in majors.</p>
<p>Anyway, UT-Austin and A&M having similar salaries would be amazing to you only if you think that the top 7% at each HS are uniformly better than the other 93%. I would argue instead that the 7% policy actually ties UT-Austin’s hands. Because that policy fills the vast majority of their student body with whoever meets that cutoff, UT-Austin can not really employ a holistic admissions philosophy (or any other admissions philosophy). Their student body will be filled with plenty of students from weaker school districts who would not have gotten the foundational education pre-college to allow them to catch up enough by the time they graduation. It would be interesting to know the socioeconomic demographics of the student bodies at UT-Austin and A&M. UT-Austin’s would more likely mirror that of TX, I imagine. Is A&M’s richer? A&M is definitely far more white (67% vs. 46%), less Hispanic (20% vs. 23%, and less black (3% vs. 5%). Also, the Payscale data you posted excludes those who go to grad school while the Payscale data I posted does not ignore those who go to grad school. I’m not sure why ignoring those alums who go to grad school is a better measure of a school since we usually think of an undergraduate school sending a high proportion of its student body onward to get advanced degrees as a good thing.</p>
<p>Also, A&M has 20% of their undergraduate student body in engineering while UT-Austin has 14% of their undergraduate student body in engineering, so what you said about them having a similar percentage of engineers is wrong.</p>