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Do Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates?                                                 

Forget U.S. News’s academic rankings and Playboy’s party-school list.For some prospective college freshmen, here’s the important question:Will I make more money if I go to Harvard, or if I go to Harvey Mudd?
PayScale, a sitethat collects data on salaries for different professions, argues thatit can help students answer that question. Today the company isreleasing an updated, gigantic data set on the salaries of graduatesfrom hundreds of universities and colleges, as well as salaries andcareer choices broken down by department/major.
The numbers are from 1.2 million users of PayScale’s site whoself-reported their salaries and educational credentials in a PayScalesurvey over the last year. While the data are not from arandomized scientific sample, they are still pretty tantalizing. Here,for example, are the rankings by median mid-career salary (minimum 10years out of school) by university:

PayScale Click image for full methodology.
Full rankings are here.An important note: The data include only survey respondents whosehighest academic degree is a bachelor’s. Therefore, doctors, lawyersand others in high-paying jobs that require advanced degrees are notincluded in the data set.
The reason for this, according to Al Lee,PayScale’s director of quantitative analysis, is that PayScale istrying to determine which undergraduate educations are the “bestinvestment.”
“You’re thinking of buying a college. If that’s all you buy — anundergraduate degree –without having to spend more money and time andeffort to get another degree,” Mr. Lee said, “you want to know what thereturn on that investment is.”
He also said that for many schools including alumni with advanceddegrees would bring down their median salaries, because in PayScale’ssample advanced degree recipients are primarily teachers gettingmaster’s degrees in order to teach. According to Mr. Lee’s data,teachers generally have more modest incomes than their classmates.
Some highlights from the data:

• Dartmouth College has the highest median mid-career salary (defined as salary at 10 years or greater after graduation).
• Loma Linda University has the highest median starting salary(defined as salaries within five years of graduation), a function oftheir strong programs in nursing, dental and allied health.
• In general, engineering schools produced the best starting salaries, and represented eight out of the top 10 schools in starting salary. On the other hand, Ivy League Schools are the best bet for mid-career pay, with five out of the top 10.
• Majors matter. Quantitative-oriented degrees –like engineering, science, mathematics and economics — filled most ofthe top 20 slots in both highest starting median salaries and highestmid-career median salaries.

• Economics majors have the fifth highest mid-career median salary, the 17th-highest starting salary, and the highest salary at the 90th percentile, mid-career mark.
• Some of the major/department numbers may fool you, though.For example, who would have thought that philosophy majors inmid-career would earn more than information technology majors inmid-career? This is probably because students who major in philosophyare more likely to go to elite schools, whereas students who major inI.T. are likely to go to pre-professional-type schools that don’t evenoffer philosophy as a major, Mr. Lee says. So it’s not really thechoice of major that’s making the difference – it’s the school.
  “A student’s choice of major has a huge impact mid-career,enormous,” says Mr. Lee. “But you generally don’t see people majoringin philosophy” — or other “soft” majors, he says — “except in topschools.”
  
• That said, here are the bottom 10 majors by mid-career salary:

PayScale

And now back to our opening question: Will you make more money if you go to Harvard or Harvey Mudd?
Well, the median graduate at Harvey Mudd appears to make more moneyin starting salary than does the median graduate from Harvard (viceversa at mid-career). But of course, the people who choose to go toHarvard over Harvey Mudd, or the other way around, are differentstudents; it would be hard to say that a particular person would makemore money going to one instead of the other.
According to researchfromAlan B. Krueger, a Princeton professor and Treasury official who usedto contribute to Economix, and Stacey B. Dale at Mathematica PolicyResearch, attending one relatively elite college (like Harvey Mudd)rather than another (like Harvard) doesn’t much affect a student’sfuture income. Rather, it’s the student who matters. Hard-working,ambitious students will do well wherever they go. The opposite appliesto mediocre or lazy students.
The one exception was lower-income students. For them, the college mattered more.
Besides, PayScale’s medians don’t tell the whole story.There’s a lot of variation within each school, which means thelowest-paid graduates of a very elite school may earn less than thehighest-paid graduates of a much less elite school.
For example, Mr. Lee suggests comparing Black Hills StateUniversity (B.H.S.U.), the school with lowest median pay, to DartmouthCollege. The 75th percentile mid-career pay of B.H.S.U. is comparableto the 10th percentile mid-career pay of Dartmouth grads.
In other words, one in four B.H.S.U. grads earns more at mid-career than one in 10 Dartmouth grads.
This variation within a school is called a “spread.” Franklin andMarshall College grads have greatest “spread” in mid-career earnings;the top 25 percent of graduates earn more than 2.6 times the earningsof the bottom 25 percent.
Among the schools with the lowest spreads – that is, the most consistently-earning alumni – is Harvey Mudd.
How do schools feel about all these numbers?
Mr. Lee says that the last time PayScale released this type of data,some schools complained about their (presumably low) rankings. He sayshe told these schools to bear in mind that students, and educators,have other criteria, besides income, for what should be valued in auniversity.
“Look, if your mission is to create graduates who become educators,who go into criminal justice, law enforcement or other social goodcareers, those jobs don’t pay well. But that’s your mission,” he says.“If you want to change your mission and send people to Wall Street orto become engineers, that’s a different thing.”
By the way, I asked Mr. Lee if there was any discernible differencein the career choices between graduates before and after the financialcrisis struck — particularly in the top-tier schools, which havetraditionally funneled a large proportion of their graduates into finance jobs. Will these graduates now choose lower-paying, public service-type jobs instead of more lucrative career paths?
Unfortunately, Mr. Lee says that year over year comparisons aredifficult because the methodology changes from year to year. Forexample, the coding for career choices changes from year to year,depending on how survey respondents label themselves.
A note: PayScale declined to say how big the sample size was foreach school, but said that for the bigger schools in many cases theresponses numbered “in the hundreds.” For many smaller schools PayScalehas not provided as much detailed statistical information because itsaid the sample size was too small.
Update: I updated the chart showing schoolswith the highest-paid graduates, which previously had accidentally leftoff some schools with top mid-career median salaries. Sorry, Yale! Itwasn’t anything personal!


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narius

Couple of comments.

First, they only show the median, and no other distributional information (quantile, variance ...). Thus, we do NOT know if the differences are statistically significant. The variation (particularly in the mid-career income, which intuitively would vary a lot more than starting) may easily overwhelm the differences.

This is a CLASSICAL example of how people try to make judgment/decision based on a single point estimate when that does NOT capture all the important information.

Secondly, it only look at the sample of people without post-grad degrees. That makes the comparison highly uninformative. Places like Caltech, MIT & Harvey Mudd have a high % of students going BEYOND a bachelor degree. By the principle of self-selection, on average, usually the better student will go on to more education. Thus, the sample is biased towards the LESS successful portion of the population and skew the results.

If I am doing the analysis, at the least a regression should be used to tease out the effect. There are STANDARD methods to include all the data and tease out the effect of a bachelor degree vs a higher one.


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qweqaz123

That's true.. thank You very much for you comment.
I know this kind of "analysis" won't be 100% accurate~
Just thought it's quite interesting