I’ll raise my hand for admitting that my major at Harvard was pretty easy. I majored in Visual and Environmental studies. It was a combination of studio arts (from film to architecture) and art theory, architectural history.
I took the entire architectural history sequence offered by the Graduate School of Design. It was easy for two reasons. Most architects can’t write. Most architectural grad students are concentrating most of their efforts on their design courses and don’t spend that much time with their other courses.
My major had a thesis requirement which usually was a portfolio. I chose to write my thesis about low cost housing in London and Berlin. It was over 100 pages long and incorporated a summer’s worth of research in Europe along with working on it during the school year. So, that part of my major at least was more rigorous than it probably needed to be, but I studied what I did because I enjoyed every minute of it, not because I was trying to major in something easy or hard.
Stevens’ own career survey indicates that the pay levels found by its engineering graduates are not consistently higher than those found by graduates of a moderately selective state school or less selective state flagship in a low cost area, and lower than those found by graduates of a selective state flagship:
Again, seventh highest of all US engineering schools, by Payscale’s survey. Payscale is independent of the schools themselves. Stevens tends to be very conservative in its outcomes reporting.
So you claim a Berkeley computer engineering graduate was offered an average starting salary of $107.7k? I don’t believe that. Is that actually a maximum not an average? Why by the way do you keep using Stevens as an example in these discussions? Stevens was one of the first engineering schools (the first in mechanical engineering) in the US and has one of the most intensive curricula in the nation. Stevens grads are paid as they are because industry knows their capability which is beyond that of most others. Incidentally I attended two other universities after Stevens including a very well known engineering institute in New England. They had nothing on Stevens believe me.
Yes, Payscale is self reported, and independent of the schools which means it is less biased than the surveys taken by the schools themselves. I still don’t believe them. Not only that, but they had 7% unemployed people by graduation? I find it surprising that a reasonably well regarded school such as Berkeley would have any unemployed engineering graduates at all particularly in the high tech Silicon Valley arena. Stevens had no unemployed or graduate school seekers of the EE/CS class at graduation.
@Engineer80 Why would you not believe $107.7k as the average starting salary for EECS majors at Cal? EECS is pretty much the hardest major to get into at Cal, and the students all are tippy-top. This is Berkeley’s data, not Payscale. Of course, not all graduates responded to the survey, as you can see in the linked PDF that response rate is 33% and they didn’t count the grads going to grad school or still looking in the average.
The EECS program and students at Stevens are the “tippy top” as well. My point is that IMO the survey taken by an independent third party such as Payscale has less “selection bias” than that taken by the schools themselves.
Has "early career" and "mid career" distinction, but that is much less controlled in terms of the more limited time frame of the college surveys (which focus on the immediate post-graduation activity, so are more directly comparable, though some caution should still be used).
I believe the UCB’s mean salary of $107K is real because I know one person graduated there and got paid that much. What needs mentioning is that only 30+% graduates participated in the survey and their jobs are on the expensive west coast.
Kid A is working at a tech start up making 70K salary, with an option package worth another 250K at today’s valuation, could quadruple in the next two years when the company goes public. The options will vest over a three year period. All of the retirement benefits are in the form of phantom stock- and so nothing is vested as of today.
Kid B is working at a large corporation making 90K, no options, but fantastic retirement benefits which vest immediately (i.e they are portable when the kid leaves) and are currently worth 30K (were put in pre-tax).
That’s really an apples to oranges comparison. Kid A is taking a much higher risk in that the startup may go belly up before his options vest, or even afterwards if that happens any stock he has would be worthless. B is trading off the possible high reward (and risk) for more stability. That’s an intangible decision, some people are of course willing to take more risk for the possible upside, others want what they perceive as more stability and security at the expense of future capital gain. B makes more to start but A may make more in a few years, or B’s company may not pan out, so you don’t know who really makes more going forward but you do know who makes more to start. Payscale doesn’t take into account options or futures, the starting salary is the only tangible quantity.
2016 median for computer science at Carnegie Mellon is in a pdf linked on this page. http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries_and_destinations/ $105,000 starting salaries (median) for undergrads. It looks like they got info from all but 8 of their grad students. (Out of 146.) So I’m inclined to believe the UCB numbers. Those numbers (+ inflation) look very similar to those that were true for my son’s class ten years ago. My son graduated with absolutely no honors or awars and was making $100,000 plus bonus straight out of college. It was actually pretty depressing for me as I have never made anywhere near that much!
That’s my point- Payscale doesn’t take into account benefits either, even though company A may pay the entire cost of an MBA in addition to a blue chip package of other benefits while company B has only a bare bones health care plan and life insurance worth 2X annual salary.
Starting salary is just the beginning of the story.
@blossom - I think you might be overstating the value of healthcare and life insurance for generally single folks in their 20’s. The benefits might cost $10k-$15k per year. Fewer and fewer places pay for MBA’s…most limit the annual total to $10k or less. I’m not sure what area your “large corporations” are, but very few have anything more than a 401(k) for new hires.
Half of those hired at CMU went to the big 4: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. They aren’t getting $250k in option upside. Great experience and nice salaries, but they’re between 5 and 25 years too late.
The PayScale reporting is definitely flawed, as it ignores deferred upside (like those in Grad school and Med School). The number of homerun hitters is offset by a lot of singles hitters.
Payscale is reporting on a level playing field, that is, direct salary. When they take a respondent’s information they specifically state to report base salary separately from options, bonuses, or future benefits. Base salary is really the only common denominator. If some of the school reported data includes options, bonuses, etc and others do not you can’t directly compare them. Payscale’s methodology is no less valid than the schools’, and IMO is largely free of bias in this regard. Deferred upside isn’t a valid criterion for reporting initial outcomes, since it is- obviously- deferred. You can’t predict what an individual student is going to do 3, 5, 10 years later.
options are no longer used, they give stock straight up that vest over 4 years, so if you’re getting say a 1000 shares from Google, that’s 780K over four years. Of course there’s risk in that as you could leave or Google could let you go, but after the first year you’ll get 250 Google shares, there’s no strike price. If the price drops to even 500, you have $125K. Now you will pay a lot more taxes and of course you’re in the bay area, so you’re a long way from affording a house.
@mathmom It is always dangerous to apply a statistical average to an individual. This holds true whether it is by major or by eliteness of the alma mater. The obsession with elite schools on CC is unhealthy, with students and perhaps parents looking for non-existent “hooks” and whatever else that may give them an edge. I cannot help but think that folks would rather be judged by a proxy than by their own merit.
A simple way around such a problem is to have students write a standardized exit exam, perhaps the GRE+ subject? A college classmate from Hong Kong told me a long time ago that was what they had to do, write a territory-wide high school graduation exam and take the result to the job interview. I guess such an approach would make life a lot easier for employers, not having to try to estimate the relative merit of a candidate with a 3.6 in English Lit from Harvard, vs one with a 3.2 in theoretical physics from Berkeley.
Given such high starting salaries for CS grads, how much of an increase are they seeing by say 10 years out? Seems to me not much, but I’m just guessing.
