<p>Dstark makes some pretty reasonable points. I would consider this survey with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Both sides make compelling arguments, but I tend to agree, these surveys should be taken with a grain of salt. Its just ridiculous to even give this any consideration in the type of college you may/may not attend. None of these figures are guarantee in anyway, so don't be fooled thinking if I go to Dartmouth, I'll make this amount of cash on demand because the world doesn't work that way.</p>
<p>
[quote]
so don't be fooled thinking if I go to Dartmouth, I'll make this amount of cash on demand because the world doesn't work that way.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Very true... there are so many factors other than what school you go to that determine your pay. Companies give high pay to people that have rare or desirable skills, and just because you go to a good school, it doesn't mean you have these rare/desirable skills.</p>
<p>morris,
I did the list using a subset of colleges and that subset did not include Bucknell (the subset is the USNWR Top 40 National Universities and the USNWR Top 20 LACs-51 of those 60 colleges had data). Maybe a little unfair, but I have found that this universe of colleges is where most of the discussion occurs on CC and thus my choice to limit the subset. </p>
<p>Brown lman and phead,
You’ll get no argument from me that one should not take the Payscale results too literally. That has not been my argument (despite the attempts of others to paint my comments in that light). This is but one data point that students can (and maybe should) evaluate as they look at colleges.</p>
<p>Hawkette, </p>
<p>They should evaluate it but they should not take the data as doctrine. So many Dartmouth alums have been running around these boards and touting their school's superiority in business placement just because of this ranking- I don't feel like this should happen, but it does.</p>
<p>Brown man,
I would agree with you about touting this as doctrine. But I do think that the Dartmouth folks have long made the argument that the school's placement abilities are superior and that they do an excellent job of placing their graduates with the most financially desirable employers. A data point such as Payscale, even with its warts, is a further attestation to their multi-survey argument.</p>
<p>I suggest you also contrast Dartmouth with high-scoring institutions on the Payscale ranking that have not been traditionally recognized as achieving at the highest level. Is the Payscale data the beginning of a series data points that will show ABC College really does belong among the nation’s most elite institutions? Are there other sources to support their arguments or is this an accident and perhaps a flawed result? For those institutions, I would use the Payscale results with a larger grain of salt and require further “proof” that the results accurately reflect what is going on with ABC’s graduates.</p>
<p>Self-selection.</p>
<p>That is ALL that can be gleaned from this data.</p>
<p>Looking for colleges with high wage earning graduates, think colleges that have student bodies with large numbers that are....</p>
<ol>
<li>from private high schools and (already) wealthy families (ESPECIALLY when looking at 75th %ile numbers)</li>
<li>from the northeast or California and ultimately settle there</li>
<li>pre-professional to business, law, medicine, engineering careers</li>
</ol>
<p>Schools in the Midwest/South?
Schools with large music, theater, journalism, education programs?
Schools with student bodies from public high schools?
Schools producing large numbers of PhDs?
Surprise, lower salaries.</p>
<p>To imply that somehow this data will predict a college's ability to promote one's ultimate earnings potential is patently ridiculous.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In that case, i totally agree.</p>
<p>It is one data point that students can utilized for consideration. As a student myself, I could see myself weeding out colleges that don't make the top while being kinda prancy glancy and not really caring who makes the top (because making the top isn't guaranteed, but making less seems like a more self-fulling prophecy than making more.)</p>
<p>lol interesting isn't it.</p>
<p>"In the yearlong effort, PayScale Inc., an online provider of global compensation data, surveyed 1.2 million bachelor's degree graduates with a minimum of 10 years of work experience (with a median of 15.5 years). The subjects hailed from more than 300 U.S. schools ranging from state institutions to the Ivy League, and their incomes show that the subject you major in can have little to do with your long-term earning power."</p>
<p>I'm very surprised to find that 1.2 million people participated in this survey.</p>
<p>I wonder how many people on CC actually read the article. :)</p>
<p>"Mr. Wise called the data thought-provoking. "These results, to some extent, confirm suspicions that many people have about the importance of a person's college choice in giving them better pay opportunities down the line," says Mr. Wise. "What we still don't know is whether or not it's the training or education the school provides that drives these pay differences, or if the people from those schools are just wired to self-select into jobs that are likely to be paid more."</p>
<p>I just thought I would repeat this.</p>
<p>"What we still don't know is whether or not it's the training or education the school provides that drives these pay differences, or if the people from those schools are just wired to self-select into jobs that are likely to be paid more."</p>
<p>Hmmm. That's kind of key.</p>
<p>Some people seem to think that this is a study and fault it on that basis, but it isn't. It is a data set. Make of it what you will.
What strikes me is that nobody seems surprised by the results.</p>
<p>^ Well if a dataset is presented the way it is, you make what you can of it. If a dataset is presented to you in such a way that it comparing two universities relative to another in a organized hierarchical ranked fashion, doesn't that qualify a study with an asserted purpose of saying XYZ has tendency to create graduates of a higher earning potential capital?</p>
<p>I'm not sure, thats why I'm asking, I could be wrong.</p>
<p>P.S. I really really despise the words "Make of it what you will", its just blatantly avoiding the most crucial aspect of our convseration the inevitable fate of our argument because we have no where to go. Haven't all our expressed opinions on this issue been "making of it as we will?"!!</p>
<p>Of course. You are all "making of it what you will".
You are arguing otherwise? How on earth could you?
For myself, I don't buy the idea that the institutions are "creating" these people to make the money they do. People self select institutions and careers.</p>
<p>no. I am the one who suggested "Haven't all our expressed opinions on this issue been 'making of it as we will' "</p>
<p>You were the one suggesting "Make of it as you will." I'm not arguing against it. ::roll eyes::</p>
<p>Interesting concept. btw, I totally agree with self selection in terms of both institution and career choices.</p>
<p>dstark - the numbers look a little better. but, you're still looking at a subset of a subset: alum who fifteen years out of college, only have a bachelors degree AND who, by definition, are dissatisfied with their present jobs.</p>
<p>Johnwesley, you're right, but I keep looking at 1.2 million people....</p>
<p>"Then I look at this....1 , $ 134,000 , Dartmouth
2 , $ 131,000 , Princeton
3 , $ 129,000 , Stanford
4 , $ 126,000 , Yale
4 , $ 126,000 , MIT
6 , $ 124,000 , Harvard
7 , $ 123,000 , Caltech
8 , $ 122,000 , Harvey Mudd
9 , $ 120,000 , U Penn
10 , $ 116,000 , Notre Dame
11 , $ 113,000 , U Chicago
12 , $ 112,000 , UC Berkeley
13 , $ 111,000 , Carnegie Mellon
14 , $ 110,000 , Cornell
14 , $ 110,000 , Rice
14 , $ 110,000 , Georgetown
17 , $ 109,000 , Brown
18 , $ 108,000 , Colgate
19 , $ 107,000 , Columbia
19 , $ 107,000 , Amherst
19 , $ 107,000 , Bowdoin
22 , $ 106,000 , Duke
22 , $ 106,000 , Georgia Tech
24 , $ 105,000 , Lehigh
25 , $ 104,000 , Vanderbilt
25 , $ 104,000 , Swarthmore
25 , $ 104,000 , Davidson
25 , $ 104,000 , W&L
29 , $ 103,000 , U Virginia
29 , $ 103,000 , Boston Coll
29 , $ 103,000 , Carleton
32 , $ 102,000 , Williams"</p>
<p>The school I went to has the poorest student body by far. Yet it kicks Williams butt. Many others too. Best return on investment. Not even close. Maybe, I'll call payscale and tell them to make another list. A more definitive list. </p>
<p>Let's see. the average Dartmouth student comes from a family with a median income over $150,000. The average Berkeley student comes from a family with a median income over $50,000.</p>
<p>From payscale's numbers....The average Berkeley student's income is $112,000. The average Dartmouth's student's income is $134,000.</p>
<p>The average Berkeley student's income, after graduating from Cal, is 124% higher than his parent's family.</p>
<p>The average Dartmouth student's income, after graduating from Dartmouth, is $134,000. 10.666666% less.</p>
<p>What's wrong with Dartmouth?</p>
<p>(I don't mean to pick on Dartmouth. It's a great school.) </p>
<p>But I'm using averages and objective numbers, aren't I?</p>
<p>But 1.2 million responses means NOTHING if it's not a representative sample of people from those schools who have bachelor degrees as their terminal degrees. And it's not. It's a drive-by, in a place where people are inherently dissatisfied with their jobs -- so it wouldn't include the people with bachelor's who started their own businesses and are making fortunes. Self-selected data is meaningless. Carolyn's exactly right, it's like collecting the SAT's of the high school seniors here and trying to pretend that they are projectable, or that they are even representative of a certain school.</p>
<p>"Is the Payscale data the beginning of a series data points that will show ABC College really does belong among the nation’s most elite institutions?"</p>
<p>"Elite educational institution" and "groomed for success on Wall Street, making boatloads of money" seem to be very different things, as far as I'm concerned. It overemphasizes those aspects of education that teach one how to manage hedge funds and do management consulting. </p>
<p>Those who are sophisticated already know that the caliber and work ethic of the person determines how far that person goes. The unsophisticated -- well, you see them all over CC, trying to get their kids into HYPS so they can be rich later on because by golly that's the only way.</p>
<p>dstark,
In response to the thoughts on self-selection and your query of whether it's the college or the student that is most responsible for the financial success of the college graduate, let me respond with a question. If you exchanged the faculty at Stanford (PA rating of 4.9) with the faculty from Pepperdine (PA rating of 3.1), do you think it would have a sizable impact on the achievement level of the Stanford graduates? I don't.</p>
<p>Also, the study does not provide averaged results. The results are the medians. And I would add that the literal interpretations that you are making (in a weak and woeful attempt to discredit the entire thing) are exactly what I and probably most folks would counsel against. </p>
<p>danas,
I think some folks are surprised by some of the results (cough…cough… U Michigan partisans). </p>
<p>pizzagirl,
Sorry if my meaning was lost in the use of "elite educational institution." I didn't necessarily mean in financial terms, but also in terms of how ABC College also performs in a variety of other college comparisons, eg, student quality comparisons, faculty reputation comparisons, financial resources comparisons, etc. If a college shows up as a stellar performer in one category, but drops off in many of the other metrics, then I'd not classify them with the high grouping of elites.</p>
<p>^^what about the point pizzagirl raises, that, if fifteen years after graduation, certain people are stuck in middle-management AND they're unhappy with their employers -- does it matter how much money they're making? If anything, I'd be alarmed that they formed a critical mass of any school's graduates in the first place.</p>
<p>Hawkette, here are your objective data, median (one form of an average and one you use 1,000s of times), and percentages. </p>
<p>"Let's see. the average Dartmouth student comes from a family with a median income over $150,000. The average Berkeley student comes from a family with a median income over $50,000.</p>
<p>From payscale's numbers....The average Berkeley student's income is $112,000. The average Dartmouth's student's income is $134,000.</p>
<p>The average Berkeley student's income, after graduating from Cal, is 124% higher than his parent's family.</p>
<p>The average Dartmouth student's income, after graduating from Dartmouth, is $134,000. 10.666666% less."</p>
<p>I may post this thousands of times. </p>
<p>And the following...</p>
<p>"But 1.2 million responses means NOTHING if it's not a representative sample of people from those schools who have bachelor degrees as their terminal degrees. And it's not. It's a drive-by, in a place where people are inherently dissatisfied with their jobs -- so it wouldn't include the people with bachelor's who started their own businesses and are making fortunes. Self-selected data is meaningless. Carolyn's exactly right, it's like collecting the SAT's of the high school seniors here and trying to pretend that they are projectable, or that they are even representative of a certain school."</p>
<p>Of course, Pizzagirl, johnwesley, Carolyn and others are correct about the problems of this survey.</p>
<p>But since you like this survey so much, I went to Cal, and my school is really number 1 when looking at objective data. </p>
<p>I guess I should ignore all the flaws in this survey and just accept it. :)</p>
<p>Maybe I missed it, but where does it say that the respondents are in middle management or that they are unhappy with their employers? </p>
<p>I think the stronger criticism is the omission of graduates with advanced degrees as they will more likely have higher salary levels. For a college like Wesleyan, this is potentially a critical influence on the reported numbers.</p>