<p>you realize, of course, the pool of baccalaureate-only grads gets smaller and smaller the higher up the academic food-chain you get? this is especially true of the LACs. Fifteen years after commencement, and only about 15% of Wesleyan grads have no additional degrees.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My bad on CMU; I had them on my list but missed them when composing that post at some ridiculous hour last night. Data is available for Duke: 58,900/105,000 which places them #28, tied with Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>But bottom line, I wholeheartedly agree with the points Carolyn raised in posts #68 and #69 about the non-scientific nature of this "survey" which is based on self-reporting by a self-selecting group of alumni registering at a particular job search website. That's as reliable as any other self-selecting online "survey" of people who find their way to a particular website, which is to say not at all. A lot of people on CC are putting way too much stock in it.</p>
<p>I believe the 0-5 years is more indicative of the actual caliber of the school rather than the long term high earners as many Ivy League students have connections and an affluent family/history so even if they went to a community college their earnings may be in the millions.</p>
<p>Also, I think Carnegie Mellon is underrated as the university is heavily divided into 7 schools and the second and third largest are the CFA and HSS schools which are not known for high salaries (theatre/voice/drama/design/liberal arts/etc). The job network for the other majors/schools is absolutely incredible. Because of a lack of outliers of privileged students with connections, I would think CMU and Uchicago are underrated in such a ranking (though both are still high on the ranking, beating out competitors Northwestern/Emory/Vanderbilt/Brown/Columbia/etc).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Also, I think Carnegie Mellon is underrated as the university is heavily divided into 7 schools and the second and third largest are the CFA and HSS schools which are not known for high salaries (theatre/voice/drama/design/liberal arts/etc).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>As Bclintonk pointed out, these surveys are really worthless unless you make sure an unbiased sample is used. For example, a sample of CFA graduates that only included people like Holly Hunter, Steven Bochco, or Ted Danson might mislead one into believing CFA alumni are among the highest-paid CMU graduates !</p>
<p>Exactly, the survey is quite worthless and my point was that there are definitely more such outliers and old money at the Ivy Leagues such as Dartmouth/Yale/Harvard who will be successful no matter where they attend. However, taking a school like CFA into the median is quite detrimental to the overall median as I believe CFA's avg salary last year barely hit 30k!</p>
<p>Here is the Salary Data Integrity explanation from the survey company (Payscale), keeping in mind that every survey has its critics. Also, Payscale is not a Job Search compay, rather it's a compensation evaluation firm.</p>
<p>"Salary Data Integrity</p>
<p>PayScale utilizes a sophisticated data validation system to ensure that survey records included in your datasets are accurate and reliable.</p>
<p>Every submitted profile has to pass through our patent-pending algorithm of 20 stringent rules that verify data accuracy, authenticity, and validity. If a profile doesn't pass all 20 rules, it's flagged for independent review by an in-house PayScale compensation analyst. Flagged data is compared against PayScale's employer-submitted data. Any data profiles deemed questionable, incomplete, or duplicate are not used in calculating compensation reports. </p>
<p>For example: </p>
<p>We only accept data that is submitted by individuals that have a current job or job offer.
All salary data ranges must fall within expected norms set forth by our compensation analysis team.
Duplicate entries are eliminated.
There must be agreement between salary range and years of experience.
The geographic location has to be in the database.
The survey must be completely filled out.
The specific education degree must be listed in the database.
Profiles submitted with rounded salary figures are flagged.
Our research and analysis has shown that PayScale Compensation Reports are not only within industry accepted ranges, but are more accurate than competitive offerings because the reported data is precisely matched to the type and size of organization as well as the skills and experience of the employee."</p>
<p>You've just proven my point. The data does not include all alumni from these colleges, only those who are currently employed and have registered with this job search site. The sample is not a statistically reliable sample of ALL alumni from these schools, or all college graduates from the 2,800 colleges and universities in the U.S.</p>
<p>What about alumni who aren't employed? Who aren't looking for jobs? Or, who aren't looking for the types of jobs advertised on payscale? Add those in, and you'll likely get different results about alumni salaries at these particular colleges.</p>
<p>And, of course, the only ranking here is among the colleges that had enough alumni register with payscale. Be careful about saying these are "the best" colleges for earning high salaries. Without data from all colleges, or at least a larger sample of the 2,800 or so colleges in the U.S., all we have here is a ranking of the "best" of those colleges included in this particular sample, and these particular job-searching alumni.</p>
<p>Again, interesting datapoints, perhaps, but it doesn't offer proof about the starting salaries of ALL recent grads (even colleges have difficulty pulling that together) or the 10-year out salaries of all alumni from these colleges. Fun to compare, sure, but be careful of thinking these are the only colleges where a grad could end up earning a good living, or that all alumni of these colleges are making salaries within range. </p>
<p>The best analogy is really College Confidential. If you took the self-reported stats of students who post here, and said they were the "average" for ALL high school students, you'd get a very skewed view of things. Similarly, if we took the high schools which have the most kids posting here on College Confidential and said that the self-reported stats averages of those kids indicated the averages of everyone in those high schools, you'd get a ridiculously skewed view of each high school's averages.</p>
<p>I would guess Carleton grads DO make far more than Oberlin grads... You see far more Carleton grads in business at elite firms in NYC and Chicago.>></p>
<p>Slipper, do you have a published source for this data?</p>
<p>You don't have to be a real "alum" to complete the survey. I did a couple now using different schools. They don't come back and ask you who the Dean was when you attended ____ or anything. There is zero verification. Now if you claim you make $500,000 a year as a school teacher it might get kicked out. But you don't really have to be a school teacher or anything else. You could be sitting in your mom's basement filling out the survey. I'd call it somewhere south of the PR school party rankings in reliability and if told the WSJ article author so.</p>
<p>^ barrons, lol. Sounds like a bit of Internet "monkeywrenching" to me. Gotta love it.</p>
<p>
[quote]
By the way, since the website in question is a job searching site, one has to wonder: If these schools were the ones that had the most alumni registering at a job search site, just how successful are the alumni at those schools if they have more people looking for jobs than all the other colleges in the U.S.?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well it's not really a job hunting website. It's just one that has a database of salary statistics. I've registered on it before to see what an employee at my level would earn, adjusted to location and experience. It has many more datapoints than my schools have and they aren't skewed by people working in low cost of living areas.</p>
<p>Top Liberal Arts Colleges Starting Median Salary Mid-Career Median Salary
(Top</a> Liberal Arts Colleges By Salary Potential)</p>
<p>Bucknell University $54,100 $110,000 </p>
<p>Colgate University $52,800 $108,000 </p>
<p>Amherst College $54,500 $107,000 </p>
<p>Lafayette College $53,900 $107,000 </p>
<p>Bowdoin College $48,100 $107,000 </p>
<p>College of the Holy Cross $50,200 $106,000 </p>
<p>Occidental College $51,900 $105,000 </p>
<p>Washington and Lee University $53,600 $104,000 </p>
<p>Swarthmore College $49,700 $104,000 </p>
<p>Davidson College $46,100 $104,000 </p>
<p>Carleton College $47,500 $103,000 </p>
<p>Williams College $51,700 $102,000 </p>
<p>Pomona College $48,600 $101,000 </p>
<p>Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) $46,500 $97,900 </p>
<p>Bates College $47,300 $96,500 </p>
<p>Union College $47,200 $95,800 </p>
<p>University of Richmond $48,600 $94,600 </p>
<p>Vassar College $46,000 $94,600 </p>
<p>Middlebury College $47,700 $94,200 </p>
<p>Mount Holyoke College $42,400 $94,100 </p>
<p>Franklin and Marshall College $49,100 $92,800 </p>
<p>DePauw University $41,400 $88,300 </p>
<p>St. Olaf College $45,300 $86,200 </p>
<p>Colby College $46,400 $85,800 </p>
<p>Gettysburg College $44,700 $85,800 </p>
<p>Siena College $45,500 $85,200 </p>
<p>Smith College $44,000 $83,900 </p>
<p>Hamilton College $49,200 $83,700 </p>
<p>Randolph-Macon College $42,600 $83,600 </p>
<p>Wellesley College $42,800 $83,500 </p>
<p>Denison University $42,000 $83,500 </p>
<p>Oberlin College $43,400 $81,600 </p>
<p>University of Puget Sound $46,600 $81,500 </p>
<p>Colorado College (CC) $38,500 $81,400 </p>
<p>Reed College $40,500 $81,100 </p>
<p>Gustavus Adolphus College $44,500 $80,600 </p>
<p>Whitman College $43,500 $80,100 </p>
<p>Ursinus College $42,100 $80,000 </p>
<p>Juniata College $41,800 $78,900 </p>
<p>Wittenberg University $39,200 $78,200 </p>
<p>Grinnell College $42,600 $76,600 </p>
<p>Skidmore College $41,600 $74,600 </p>
<p>Moravian College $42,500 $74,400 </p>
<p>Lewis & Clark College $38,900 $72,600 </p>
<p>Fort Lewis College $42,000 $69,800 </p>
<p>Thomas Aquinas College $41,500 $67,500 </p>
<p>Evergreen State College $39,500 $63,900 </p>
<p>Methodology
This chart is based upon PayScale Salary Survey data for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees who are full-time employees in the United States. These results may not represent all attendees of these colleges. Salary is the sum of compensation from base salary, bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, and overtime, if applicable, but does not include equity (stock) compensation. See full methodology for more.</p>
<p>To #89,
I don't think that most people would try to logon to their website to fool them unless one holds a grudge or something. It can be done, but that doesn't mean people are doing it.</p>
<p>it's worth noting that half the top ten LACs offer degrees in either accounting, engineering or both (Bucknell, Lafayette, HC, W&L and Swarthmore.)</p>
<p>As has been pointed out on several other threads, this is a completely bogus "survey." Its methodology is deeply suspect, and does not yield the results that are claimed.</p>
<p>Amherst has the highest starting median salary.
Oh, boy! 54,500!</p>
<p>I am relishing the Payscale study and its results. I have a kid at Cornell, Colgate and Bucknell. Hey, they have the potential to make mucho bucks apparently! </p>
<p>But the interesting thing is how people on CC seem to think that one "top rated " school is significantly better than the other. My D at Cornell and my S at Colgate basically had the identical stats, (SAT totals were the same, although one got higher in math and another higher in verbal, etc. Both were within the top 10 NY News rankings schools ) My second D's stats were only slightly lower. They took the same hs advanced classes. They are all three equally intelligent.</p>
<p>My D who attends Cornell had a classmate accepted/attending MIT and another accepted/attending Stanford. My D had a higher gpa/class standing and SAT than either of them. She got the Byrd scholarship, they did not.</p>
<p>So my point is, there is probably very little significant difference between the students at top schools.</p>
<p>Not a big surprise that Notre Dame and Holy Cross performed the best among Catholic schools given their strong national alumni networks.</p>
<p>It's impossible to get accurate data with regards to anything when ranking institutions. There are always confounding variables. However, this data does point to some reasonable conclusions which make it legitimate in my eyes. The fact that UMich is not part of the 100K+ club is kind of a surprise though.</p>
<p>People will be badly misled if they believe this data somehow predicts a college's ability to contribute to earning potential after graduating. </p>
<p>All schools self-select to some degree. Large pre-professional undergrad populations with big Engineering and Business/Economics departments? Large population pre-med? Expensive Northeast and West Coast location with much higher cost of living? These factors will predict ultimate salaries (also note NOT after-living expense earnings) much better than the particular school one attends.</p>
<p>It's actually a bit surprising that schools like Swarthmore and Carleton that tend to breed very large numbers of PhDs score so well. Carleton's midwest location should also have predicted lower salaries due to the much lower cost of living there. At Oberlin, where ultimate incomes are lower, the large number of music majors there (not exactly high salary earners) is undoubtedly contributing.</p>
<p>All in all, these numbers say little about what a particular school will be able to do for your ultimate earning potential. It says more about the driven, competitive nature of the student body and the tendency of those students to pursue more or less lucrative particular career paths.</p>