Using the Economist median salaries by school (10 years after enrollment), a simple average salary was calculated for the 6 major athletic conferences, and 4 more academically-focused conferences. The rankings and averages are as follows:
Conferences ranked by average salary
10 year numbers??? Really? Those are way too low. Those look like starting salaries but the first three are way too high.
@onthebubble here is the source data. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university
A few things stand out to me:
As parent of a new SEC grad whose starting salary is higher than any of those numbers, I question the relevance of this list.
Are those adjusted for regional differences in standard of living?
They don’t account for students that go to graduate school either. The time frame in that ranking is a horrible benchmark to use. You cannot evaluate engineers and accounting majors versus kids going to medical school or law school, or those that choose a career in education. In the former, income tops out rather quickly no matter where you get your degree. The latter make more outside of the time frame once out of medical or another graduate school.
Look at where Yale is ranked…dead last. Figure that one out.
If you look through Payscale at mid-career earnings you see a much more reasonable comparison, but again some schools generate students with different career aspirations, so it is not fair to compare a college professor or nurse to an engineer.
@OnTheBubble Yale does quite well by this metric with a median salary of $66k.
@chardo This says more about the average student salary in a conference compared to others. It says little about individual students. Especially here on cc: / Lake Wobegon where everyone is above average.
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Are those adjusted for regional differences in standard of living?
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Sounds like they don’t…and that’s significant. Not adjusting for COL differences is significant, along with not accounting for those who go to grad school.
The COL of living is much lower in the south…real estate is lower, prop taxes are lower, state taxes are lower, gasoline is lower, many groceries are lower, along with a whole bunch of other costs.
This 10 year mark almost captures S1, who enrolled in an SEC school in 2007, but he’s earning a lot more than the top number as well. S2, who enrolled in 2009, hasn’t earned a dime since mid-2013!
Plus…how are they gathering this data? What size are the samples and how was this info obtained? Self-reporting?
I’m not sure how relevant this is in any context or is surprising to anyone.
If Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Northwestern, Duke, Caltech, Georgetown, and Rice formed some athletic conference (forget how improbable such a thing may be), I’m sure that conference’s average salary would compare favorably to the Ivies.
Substitute ND, Vandy, and Cal for MIT, UChicago, and Caltech if you want to keep it all DivI. The number would be similar.
No Yale does not. It has the largest deficit to expectation and is in fact dead last. I don’t believe that.
@PurpleTitan “I’m not sure how relevant this is in any context or is surprising to anyone.”
While there are limitations, I think there are some useful observations, for those inclined to move beyond posting about what it does not tell you. A few things stand out to me:
You are joking right? Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are both college dropouts, but they were effectively computer science majors.
If you want a comfortable 6-figure income, go into medicine. If you want a mostly guaranteed low 6-figure income with the possibility of a 8 or 9 figure net worth, go into engineering/CS and create a successful business, or join a successful business on the ground floor.
@mom2collegekids, I believe this is the Federal data based off of income of fin aid recipients. Agree that this isn’t a very relevant metric, especially for giant publics that take in (sometimes have to) kids of varying quality as their mission of serving all demographics of a state. Nor is comparing the average salaries of a uni with music, education, journalism, and communication schools but no undergraduate b-school with another uni with both an undergrad b-school and nursing school or a third school that concentrates in STEM comparing apples to apples.
@Much2learn, you can discern that just by looking at individual schools, the majors they offer, and what region they are in. I’m not sure how grouping by conference gains you anything. There is a wide variance of ability at any giant public (outside of maybe the very best publics). Many B10 publics have some terrific students. The bottom tier of students at those publics won’t be so terrific.
@hebegebe Reality check, average salary of an orthopedic surgeon, $500,000, general surgeon $300,000, pediatrician $175,000, electrical engineer, $71,000, civil engineer $82,000. Need any more info?
BTW, doctors also create businesses. Who do you think owns all the MRI clinics? And I am sure the two dermatologists that started Pro Active are doing pretty darn well.
No surprises here at all.
@onthebubble I used the median income reported for Yale in The Economist rankings, not their performance metric. Salaries are real, but their performance metric is an abstraction. By salary they did quite well at $66k.
@mom2collegekids I agree that cost of living negatively impacts the SEC and probably the Big Twelve in this ranking.
@PurpleTitan “…comparing the average salaries of a uni with music, education, journalism, and communication schools but no undergraduate b-school with another uni with both an undergrad b-school and nursing school or a third school that concentrates in STEM comparing apples to apples.”
I disagree. I think salary outcomes matter for students and parents. I have never, not even once, visited a college that stated up-front that if you want a good salary after graduation, then you should attend somewhere else. All colleges make it sound like they have amazing placement for the average student, but on a relative basis all of them don’t.
“The Big Ten has amazing students, but is not doing a great job of getting them amazing salaries on average.”
Silly statement.
To follow up, this is a bit dated now, but I expect the ratios to be the same even if all numbers have gone up:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Salaries_for_Colleges_by_Type-sort.html
As you can see, the UIUC 75th percentile outearns the Harvard median at midcareer (yet I’m quite certain that nowhere near one quarter of the UIUC student body could have gotten in to Harvard).
In any case, I’m not sure what you were surprised by. That the Ivies have higher average salaries on average than the B10 average? That grads of East Coast privates who don’t send a relatively high percentage of grads in to PhD programs earn a relatively high salary 10 years after start of undergrad when you don’t adjust by region and COL? That LAC’s that send a relatively high percentage of grads in to PhD programs and med school don’t fare so well when you look at salary 10 years from the start of undergrad?
Anyway, for purely earnings, your major and profession would matter more than your school, for the most part.