I earlier posted about DigiPen. It is a small private unaccredited school in my area.
They are actually a pretty cool school. They have some qualities I have not found in other schools that I sure would have liked to. Digipen’s CS program actually has some merit.
That being said there are much better programs, and a lot of their practices are sketchy. I don’t plan on attending there. I have found a bunch more better places especially since I am considering graduate school.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend who wanted me to go there. And I realized he may have actually had a point.
As it turns out DigiPen is the top starting income in my state and #25 in the nation according to college scorecard (which is run by the government so I assume the data has to be accurate).
How is this possible? They are small, relatively unknown outside of the area, private, and unaccredited. They also do not frequently do internships a lot (however a lot of students leave before graduation to take a job).
Why is such a seemingly bad school having such high starting salaries?
Does the average starting salary for a BS CS graduate actually vary from institution to institution?
For those that graduate (only 54%), they are going into one of the highest paying fields currently. They should be much higher than they are if they were actually that good.
In the field, the starting salary is 15K above average, compared to much higher amounts at other schools such as RPI, which is about 30K above average for computer science.
Yes, although it’s not a commonly published statistic. It would be nice if it was, but even then, you have to account for the location of the jobs which can really skew things.
Long story short, it’s the subjects they graduate and the low graduation rate that make it possible. A single number can be misleading in isolation of context.
I’ll take a shot at it: The college scorecard salary numbers are for all students in all majors for a given college. Graduates of DigiPen are all in CS related fields. You’d need to find good data on the earnings of just CS related majors at other institutions to have a valid comparison.
The college scorecard data is not for starting salaries, it’s for salaries 10 years after students first enroll in the school.
This means that students at traditional schools, who often go to grad school, would just be getting started in their professional careers when the salary snapshot was taken which would to pull down the average.
I see that DigiPen is located in the Seattle area so presumably most of its graduates work there. The DigiPen salary doesn’t look very good compared to the average programmer salary in the area (but if most graduates are working in other IT capacities, it could actually be an ok number).
Hope that helps. I know nothing about the school/company so I’m not trying to bash it (and you obviously know enough to be skeptical of any for-profit college).
Definitely don’t go there (or anyplace similar) if you think that grad school is in your future.
RPI is a more selective college than Digipen. Their admit rates are similar, but RPI students enter with much higher average test scores and HS GPAs. So any alumni salary differences may (to some hard-to-determine degree) be telegraphing difference in entering student abilities. Or not. It’s quite hard to get an unbiased, apples-to-apples comparison of alumni outcomes, especially when we’re comparing very different kinds of colleges.
I think that the average starting salary tends to vary because of where graduates go, but not because graduates from one school command a higher salary than others. For example, MIT or RPI or Michigan or UW graduates probably work at larger technology companies in major urban areas with higher starting salaries more often than, say New Mexico State or Georgia State graduates. But if a GSU graduate does get hired at the same company as an MIT graduate, they’re likely to get paid the same amount.