Yale's performance in collegescorecard.ed.gov

I was cold today, there must not be Global Warming.

Good point @T26E4 and that’s great that you got to take a class with David Swensen. He’s done great work and from what I understand a number of other leading university endowments are now led by people who used to work in his group.

Speaking of investing, Robert Shiller gave a talk during Bulldog Days a few months back . . . don’t know if he teaches any undergraduate classes though.

I doubt if this disparity means anything at all. But to find out if it does, you’d have to know a lot more. For example, are there significant differences among these colleges in terms of how many students (and how many members of this subgroup in particular) go into academia? Or how many go to work for non-profits or government as opposed to the private sector? Or how many go into the arts?

Since my kids are probably down the career path of finance, I have paid some attention to it. My impression is that Yale is the least pre-professional among its peers, in stark contrast to Duke, Georgetown and UPenn. I believe the career choice of Yale graduates plays a big role in the stats we’ve seen.

^ This, plus the smallish cadre of bachelors for the engineering majors – which always boosts the grad salary figure.

I am mostly comparing Yale with Harvard and Princeton because I consider them to be the same “type” of colleges. (And I am not even comparing Yale with Stanford for that matter.) I do agree that students from Yale as a whole are perhaps more “artsy” and less STEM, which might be a reason why the average earnings of Y graduates are lower - pretty significantly when compared with H and P according to the scorecard. What I’m a little “concerned about” is that in this context we are actually looking at a subset of students, students who are on debt or are from low income families (i.e. those eligible for Pell grant). If they are not as motivated to be employed in more profitable fields, I’d want to know why. As a matter of fact, I am wondering if the average earning figures provided here should be the high end when all students are considered because who else should be more motivated to make money than those who are on debt or very poor?

How do students who have federal aid differ from other students? If they do differ, then it might make a big difference whether a school has 3% of students with federal aid, or 47% with federal aid.

@Hunt: According to collegenavigator, for 2013-2014, info on students from HYP receiving federal aid follows:
School/ Pell Grants/ federal student loans
Y/ 12%/ 9%
H/ 13%/ 4%
P/ 13%/ 5%

Those percentages look similar to me. Not exact of course, but I’d say we are roughly comparing “apples with apples” here.

@Panpacific: You’re reading way too much into this. Harvard has more student’s that go into finance (20% by a NYTimes recent article), while Yale has 11% going into finance. Ten years down the road, that translates into a handful of student’s making millions on Wall Street which tends to skew the averages.

Harvard: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/upshot/why-a-harvard-professor-has-mixed-feelings-when-students-take-jobs-in-finance.html?_r=0

Yale: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/11/18/not-all-finance-is-banking/

^^ Or, to put it another way: If you’re interested in finance, go to Harvard as you will have more like-minded friends there than at Yale.

@gibby: it’s 10 years after “entering” instead of “graduation”, so most likely this is their first job out of college. Not sure I am reading too much into it. Just trying to make sense out of the pretty big differences we see in this metric on scorecard. And thanks - you input helped.

^^ If you google hard enough you can find quite a few graduates from Harvard who are millionaires by 28 (6 years out of college) – and most of them did it by going into finance or computer science. Harvard graduates go into finance at almost double the rate Yale graduates do. As Yale is now importing CS50 from Harvard, I would think more Harvard graduates go into CS than Yale graduates and Yale is trying to catch that wave. Given the money that can be made in both those fields, I think that explains why Harvard’s average income is skewed higher than Yale’s. And it’s a lot more plausible than your theory about pell grant recipients.

Heck, Yale didn’t even make this list that Harvard tops: https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/pulse/top-10-universities-producing-millionaires-oliver