average starting salary for harvard grads?

sakky
Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:31:46 +0000

Yeah, but that’s Wharton. Obviously a preprofessional degree program is going to produce people who make more money than the average. For example, if I just looked at the EECS graduates from MIT, I would see a very high starting salary.

When you look at Harvard as a broad spectrum, you will see that there are some majors that will make a lot of money, and other majors that won’t make you much money at all. Harvard liberal arts students, for example, don’t make a high average starting salary, just like Princeton liberal arts students don’t make a high average starting salary, as shown by the data. On the other hand, it should not be surprising to find that Harvard computer science majors make a high average starting salary, just like Princeton and MIT computer science make a high average starting salary. The fact is, certain majors, especially the preprofessional ones, are more marketable than others. Now, will there be a few liberal arts majors that rake it in? Of course. Will there by a few computer science majors that get paid peanuts? Again, of course. But it is true that a Harvard computer science student will make a higher starting salary on average, compared to a Harvard liberal arts student. It’s just that Harvard has a lot of liberal arts students.

I would also comment about the jobs that those Wharton guys are getting. Generally, in order to get bonuses like that, you gotta be working in investment banking. The biggest turnoff about investment banking is the hours. You literally are working 80-100 hours a week. You may be making good money, but you’re also consumed by the workload. A lot of people just don’t want to spend their youths in the office like that. I know people who have gotten investment banking offers and turned them down because they didn’t want to be working those kinds of hours. I know other people who worked for a short time and then quit, again, because of frustration with the hours. Money isn’t everything. You have to think about what you’re giving up to get that money.