Colleges with Highest Income Students at Age 34 and Highest Income Parents

Parents Forum
1

As part of the Ivy League income thread, I looked up income stats in the Chetty database. I am starting a new thread, rather than derailing the existing the thread. This Chetty sample uses 1980s birth cohorts, so most attended college in the 2000s. Student income is measured at age 34 in 2010s and derived from tax records. Parents income is for same classes as students. A user friendly GUI that includes similar stats is at Economic diversity and student outcomes at Harvard - The New York Times .

Income at Age 34
Highest Median: All Colleges
1 . St Louis Pharmacy
2. Albany Pharmacy
3. MA Pharmacy
4. Philadelphia Pharmacy
5. MIT
6. Babson
7. Stevens
8. Penn
9. Princeton
10. SUNY Maritime

Highest Median: Non-Specialty Colleges (no pharmacy/business/tech/… colleges)
1 . Penn
2. Princeton
3. Duke
4. Stanford
5. Georgetown
6. Harvard
7. Lehigh
8. Cornell
9. Notre Dame
10. CMU

Highest Median: Publics, Non-Specialty
1 . UVA
2. Michigan
3. UC Berkeley
4. UCLA
5. SUNY: Binghamton
6. UCSD
7. UC Davis
8. UC Irvine
9. College of NJ
10. SUNY: Stony Brook

Highest Median: Tech Colleges
1 . MIT
2. Stevens
3. Kettering
4. WPI
5. RPI
6. Rose Hulman
7. Caltech
8. Harvey Mudd
9. Colorado Mines
10. GeorgiaTech

Highest Median: LACs
1 . Bucknell
2. Colgate
3. CMC
4. Amherst
5. Union
6. St Johns
7. Providence
8. Stonehill
9. Williams
10. Pomona

Largest Portion Top 10% Income
1 . St Louis Pharmacy
2. MA Pharmacy
3. Albany Pharmacy
4. Philadelphia Pharmacy
5. SUNY Maritime
6. Stevens
7. Rose Hulman
8. MIT
9. Babson
10. WPI

Largest Portion Top 5% Income
1 . St Louis Pharmacy
2. Albany Pharmacy
3. MA Pharmacy
4. Philadelphia Pharmacy
5. Babson
6. Penn
7. Princeton
8. Duke
9. Stanford
10. Harvard

Largest Portion Top 1% Income
1 . Princeton
2. Penn
3. Harvard
4. Stanford
5. Duke
6. MIT
7. Yale
8. Babson
9. Dartmouth
10. Georgetown

Upper & Lower End of Tier Group
Highest Ivy+: MIT, Penn
Lowest Ivy+: Chicago, Brown
.
Highest “Other Elite”: Georgetown, RPI, Rose Hulman, Caltech
Lowest “Other Elite”: Reed, Oberlin, Vassar, Scripps
.
Highest “Highly Selective Private”: Babson, Stevens, Kettering
Lowest “Highly Selective Private”: Bennington, Bard, Hampshire
.
Highest “Highly Selective Public”: Colorado Mines, GeorgiaTech, Michigan
Lowest “Highly Selective Public”: UW System, MN System, Pitt System

Parents (old sample)
Highest Median: Parents
1 . Washington & Lee
2. Middlebury
3. Princeton
4. Colgate
5. Davidson
6. Yale
7. Trinity
8. Vanderbilt
9. Brown
10. Duke

Largest Portion Top 1% Income: Parents
1 . Vanderbilt
2. Middlebury
3. SMU
4. Princeton
5. Colgate
6. Trinity
7. Duke
8. Brown
9. Colby
10. Williams

Smallest Portion Bottom 60% Income: Parents
1 . Washington & Lee
2. Richmond
3. Notre Dame
4. Davidson
5. Princeton
6. Muhlenberg
7. Colby
8. Wake Forest
9. William & Mary
10. WUSTL

7 Likes
2

Interesting - of course, some lists where it says no business (I assume you mean no Babson/Bentley) or no Tech - like an MIT.

All those schools have one or both.

It’s interesting Stevens is so high (to me), Lehigh on non - specialty but guessing mostly tech/business, Bing, TCNJ and Stonry Brook, Kettering, etc.

Stonehill higher than Williams and Pomona?

3

Presumably, what is meant is that the college is not focused on a specialty area like business or engineering, even though it may have those areas.

However, even non-specialty colleges can be skewed somewhat toward or away from some areas of academics.

1 Like
4

Yes. Babson only offers business related majors. MIT is a “institute of technology” school, although a significant minority major in non-tech fields. Kettering U is >95% tech/business. The list is intended to exclude such colleges and instead include colleges where there is a wider distribution of majors groupings.

The overwhelming majority of students at Stevens major in tech and business, so I am not surprised it had a high median income. However, I did not expect that Stevens would have the 2nd highest median income of all “instituted of technology” type schools, not far from MIT.

One key reason for what may seem like counterintuitive results is looking at median, rather than mean. Highly selective private colleges like MIT or Williams tend to have a much larger portion of students in top 1% income than not as selective colleges like Stevens and Stonehill. The small minority with top 1% or top 0.1% income can have a dramatic impact on mean, but have little impact on median. Instead median often more closely follows major/career path distribution – a larger portion choosing tech, business, finance, and similar rather than having the highest possible salary within those fields.

At both MIT and Stevens, the majority major in tech fields, so I’d expect median to relate to follow distribution within those tech fields. At lower ranked Caltech, a bit smaller portion major in tech/business, but I suspect the bigger issue is that a larger portion of Caltech students pursue academia, pulling down median.

This touches on why looking at median income without considering major or career path distribution has little meaning. Nevertheless, I find the stats interesting.

Looking at mean income instead of median income, the top 1% kids pull up the mean for highly selective private colleges, resulting in an order that may more closely follow expectations.

All Colleges
1 . Stanford
2. Penn
3. Harvard
4. MIT
5. Princeton
6. Yale
7. Duke
8. Babson
9. Dartmouth
10. Columbia

LACs
1 . Harvey Mudd
2. Washington & Lee
3. Amherst
4. Colgate
5. Haverford
6. Bucknell
7. Williams
8. Middlebury
9. CMC
10. Holy Cross

Tech
1 . MIT
2. Caltech
3. Harvey Mudd
4. WPI
5. Stevens
6. RPI
7. Rose Hulman
8. Colorado Mines
9. GeorgiaTech
10. Digipen

1 Like
5

Very interesting information, @Data10

This is a 2010 income snapshot — I wonder what it would look like with a more recent one.

Stevens (a college that I love, and recommend to many STEM students here in NJ) has an acceptance rate around 45% and it was far higher in the early 2000s. So I wouldn’t label it a “highly selective” school.

Same with Kettering — it’s in the high 70s.

6 Likes
6

Stevens and TCNJ probably both benefit from being in relatively high cost-of-living areas. I know quite a few Stevens grads in FinTech in NYC. It’s a popular path.

And TCNJ graduates a lot of teachers where New Jersey has the 4th highest starting salaries for teachers and 8th highest average salary. Also, pharma recruits fairly heavily at TCNJ (TCNJ has a particularly strong chemistry program). I also know a couple of MDs that graduated from TCNJ that preferred the small class sizes for their undergrad. Not sure those elements can really explain why TCNJ shows up high on this list, but it might help.

2 Likes
7

When did Chicago become an Ivy?

8

It says “Ivy Plus,” a group that Chicago is usually considered a member of.

2 Likes
9

Chicago is part of what some call Ivy+(plus) schools…usually Stanford, MIT, Chicago. Sometimes Duke, sometimes JHU.

The nomenclature maybe started here but I’m not sure. About – Ivy Plus Libraries

IME, Different people (counselors, consultancies, admissions) put different schools in the Ivy+ category.

10

This is a key point that so many miss when looking at income rankings like the ones you put together. If a student wants to be a history professor, what matters most on outcomes is: a) which schools give them the best chance of achieving that?; and b) if they don’t achieve that, which schools are likely to give them the best outcomes otherwise?

The median/mean incomes of history majors at different schools may be relevant to point b above, but may not be relevant (or may even be inversely correlated to point a depending on what those history majors at other schools primarily pursue as a career - say law or business for example instead of teaching).

What the median income of other students at other schools are is largely irrelevant to the student passionate about history teaching’s assessment of schools. Unless he radically changes path (which of course could happen), the income of those others tells him nothing about what his future income might be given his interests.

4 Likes
11

As a parent who attended one of the lowest ranking and who has a daughter also attending a lower ranking school I will say that those who attend certain undergraduate institutions are also more likely to choose lower paying careers. It’s not that you can’t make money coming from one of those institutions but personality/interest wise you are less likely to do so. Given my graduate degree (top 5 law school) I could have easily made plenty of money - but while I sometimes regret not having more money I would probably make the same choices all over again. It’s not like I live in poverty. My daughter is even less likely to make a high income than I was. Though maybe she’ll have the sense to marry rich, something I didn’t manage to do :rofl:.

2 Likes
12

Yeah, it seems obvious to me a lot of choice of location and choice of field factors are involved in these rankings. I have no idea how to reliably control for all that, which is part of why I tend to have low levels of interest in rankings like this for actual college choice purposes (for other purposes I think they can be quite interesting to consider).

By the way, WashU recently announced it was acquiring the St Louis College of Pharmacy (actually the whole university, but that is the component that will persist as a new WashU school):

Hidden agenda to increase its score on some of these metrics? Almost surely not, but I find it an amusing thought.

1 Like
13

I note marrying well in order to feel free to pursue careers for interest/fulfillment, as opposed to just maximizing the financial reward, is not just an option for women (ask me how I know . . . ).

4 Likes
14

Very true. Especially given the current demographics of college students with women far outnumbering men. Sadly, many men still see a woman who earns more or has more wealth as some kind of critique of their manhood. A self-harming mentality I will never understand. Many in my friend group (including me) are proud of our wives who earn more income than us.

4 Likes
15

I in fact struggle not to be TOO proud of marrying well (for some reason my wife finds my attitude a little much sometimes).

But really, it is just logical. If a woman with a high-quality MBA and promising start on a business career is willing to sign up to a life with a then Philosophy PhD student perpetually on the precipice of total financial collapse, you KNOW it has to be love . . . .

OK, so which colleges are best for developing high levels of what we might call “compensating charms”?

5 Likes
16

The tier groupings, such as “highly selective private” or “Ivy plus”, are included in Chetty’s database. Ivy+ and “elite private” indicate “most competitive” in Barron’s Profile of American Colleges, 2009. “Highly selective” indicates “highly competitive” or “highly competitive+” in Barron’s 2009. Barron’s defined “highly competitive” as follows. For Kettering, I’m guessing they were going more by SAT and HSGPA of admits than admit rate.

“Accepted students are generally in the top fifth to top third of their high school class and have ‘B+’ averages. SAT scores are typically in the 1200–1300 range (ACT about 27–29). About one-third to one-half of applicants are accepted.”

A list of where different colleges fall on this Barron’s competitivity scale is at Ranking Colleges by Selectivity - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

17

Of course, then there is the matter of trying to separate selection effects from treatment effects when considering which school is better for the intended goals and backup plans.

18

My DH likes to say (to my annoyance/eyeroll) that his mother loved that he married a Jewish doctor :roll_eyes:

4 Likes
19

100%

Stonehill produces a lot of teachers, I believe (at least everyone I know who went there is a teacher?) and ranks highly for LACs (I wouldn’t really call it a LAC myself though) and the same for MA. - Teachers are highly paid in MA.

1 Like
20

The database also includes information on % married at age 34. However, controls by income don’t go beyond quintile, so not what people on this forum would consider especially high income. Women’s colleges tend to being among lowest % married, but not colleges that are highest % men. For example, Rose Hulman had the highest % men among “elite” colleges and the highest % married among non-religious colleges. This might suggest that women attending highly selective colleges are less likely to be married at age 34 than men.

Upper & Lower End of Tier Group: % Married at 34
Highest Ivy+: Duke (59%), Princeton (59%)
Lowest Ivy+: Chicago (50%), Brown (52%) – same 2 listed as lowest income
.
Highest “Other Elite”: Notre Dame (68%), Rose Hulman (67%), Richmond (66%)
Lowest “Other Elite”: Oberlin (44%), Vassar (45%), Occidental (46%)
.
Highest “Highly Selective Private”: Wheaton (74%), Westmont (74%)
Lowest “Highly Selective Private”: Sarah Lawrence (36%), Bard (37%)
.
Highest “Highly Selective Public”: Texas A&M (73%), Colorado Mines (69%)
Lowest “Highly Selective Public”: SUNY: Stony Brook (48%), UC Berkeley (50%)

All Colleges – Religious colleges are highest, such as 85% at BYU. Lowest colleges are at <15% and show few clear patterns, tend to be not highly selective specialty colleges in bigger cities.

2 Likes