<p>According to payscale.com, Duke alumni are the highest paid of all the other schools participating in this year’s NCAA college basketball tournament by earning $102,000/yr. Go Devils!</p>
<p>Note that Stanford and Notre Dame are not represented in this year’s tournament and they were last year’s #1 and #2.</p>
<p>It is exciting to see a number of top academic schools represented in the NCAAs this year. Basketball eligibility standards seem a lot more stringent than in football for athletes.</p>
<p>I am not sure that I understood this- is this the average income for the individuals that were on the basketball team or the average income for alumni of the school in general?</p>
<p>The later. It, of course, fails to mention that a decent number of alumni at these schools don’t judge their success by the amount of money they make in any given year.</p>
<p>I don’t entirely understand why anyone would correlate basketball performance for a team affiliated with the university with alumni income levels. I definitely don’t think this is a causative effect. Do people think that the basketball performance earns graduates of the school a higher paying position?</p>
<p>I am also not sure that I understand the idea of determining an average income for all alumni of a school. It would make more sense if the averages excluded people who went onto post graduate work which so frequently carries an added increase in salary of bachelors holders. Also, it seems silly to normalize it across all fields since certain fields that aren’t represented at Duke, eg social work, pay much less than other fields that may be overrepresented at Duke eg. investment banking. Furthermore, the average income seems dependent on the age of the alumni poled. Recent grads won’t be making close to average and if a school expanded or decreased their undergraduate enrollment, it seems that that would change their averages as well. I don’t think that this is a very good way to judge the success of a school in preparing their undergrads for a career.</p>
<p>It also does not take into consideration geographic distribution of alums. A large chunk of USC and Cal alums live in California and a large chunk of Duke and Cornell alums live in the Mid Atlantic and Northeast. The average price of rent, home ownership and general cost of living in those areas are the highest in the nation, so it hardly comes as a surprise that those four universities lead the NCAA tournament in alumni salaries.</p>
<p>Of course, as belevitt and CayugaRed point out, it does not take career choices and student makeup into account. There are just too many factors to make any sort of judgement from average salary surveys.</p>
<p>It seems that USA is contradicting the Payscale numbers in the WSJ seven months ago that had Cornell at $110K and Duke at $106K. Cal was $112K, USC was $99.6K and UMichigan was $93K. Stanford, which USA Today cites is the highest at $115K, was $129K. Can salaries really have come down so much in such a short period of time?</p>
<p>As everyone has stated, the figures don’t take into consideration geography and type of majors. Of course, people who live on the coasts will make more money in order to afford the higher cost of living. This is a faulty study. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, it’s impressive that Michigan made it to the top of the list considering its geography (Midwest) and negative perception from some haters. A Michigan degree will help you anywhere you choose to live.</p>
<p>Get some real data and call me in the morning. Payscale is a farce. I never heard of it until these reports came out. Anyone can claim anything for any school they want. There is no verification and it’s not scientific in the least. It is utter crap.</p>
<p>gellino’s numbers are the ones that i saw before too and the ones that are on payscales website. </p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that this is a survey that only considers those with a undergrad degree from one of these schools as their only degree. Therefore, anybody who has a MBA or a JD or a masters, etc is disqualified from the survey.</p>
<p>In my opinion, that really throws off some of the statistics</p>
<p>It’s simple really. The value of a degree at a prestigious university increases exponentially the farther you get away from its location. There is an oversupply of Michigan grads working in Ann Arbor so the degree loses its allure.</p>
<p>Cambridge, MA may be the one place in the whole world where a Harvard degree doesn’t mean a lot reputation wise.</p>
It is exciting to see the top schools doing well. The Final Four should be interesting, that’s for sure.</p>