Typically, besides 150 credits, there are subject requirements, such as __ credits in accounting, __ credits in business, etc. Not sure what the reason for 150 credits is, since the subject requirements add up to much less than 120 credits. Also, the extra 30 credits does not have to be a master’s degree.
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Papers in the 1980s and 1990s routinely showed that graduates of highly selective schools earned 3% to 7% higher wages for every 100-point increase in their school’s average SAT score… However, critics suspected these earlier studies suffered from severe selection bias: highly selective colleges admit students who are already unusually talented, ambitious, and well-connected…. Dale and Krueger solved this selection problem with a clever strategy: they compared students who received the exact same set of college acceptances and rejections, but chose to attend different institutions…. Their core finding was that student quality matters much more than school quality: students with high academic capabilities and strong drive earned roughly the same later in life, regardless of whether they went to an Ivy League university or a less-selective public state school.
References
Black, D. A., & Smith, J. A. (2004). How robust is the evidence on the effects of college quality? Evidence from matching. Journal of Econometrics, 121(1–2), 99–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4076(03)00208-5
Chetty, R., Deming, D. J., & Friedman, J. N. (2023). Diversifying society’s leaders? The determinants and causal effects of admission to highly selective private colleges (NBER Working Paper No. 31492). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31492 Cited by: 348
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2020). Income segregation and intergenerational mobility across colleges in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(3), 1567–1633. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa005
Dale, S. B., & Krueger, A. B. (2002). Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An application of selection on observables and unobservables. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), 1491–1527. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355302320935089 Cited by: 1785
Dale, S. B., & Krueger, A. B. (2014). Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data. Journal of Human Resources, 49(2), 323–358. https://doi.org/10.3386/jhr.49.2.323 Cited by: 437
Hoekstra, M. (2009). The effect of attending the state high-quality state university on earnings: A regression discontinuity approach. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 91(4), 717–724. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.91.4.717
Mountjoy, J., & Hickman, B. R. (2021). The returns to college(s): Relative value-added and match effects in higher education (NBER Working Paper No. 29276). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w29276
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Extra points for the sourcing!
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Regular folks use these numbers as predictive. Which they are not. Nobody cares about how much money YOUR kid is making, they only care about how much money THEIR kid is going to make after majoring in Finance from XYZ college and getting a great job in M&A at Goldman Sachs. Or majoring in Math from ABC college and getting an even BETTER job as a quant at DE Shaw. Real people make real decisions here- how much to borrow (hey, great ROI for finance majors! Take that HELOC!) and how much of their 401K it’s worth “raiding”.
There are too many messy variables here. It’s not like data from the CDC that shows the mortality rate for a 65 year old man who smoked three packs a day since he was 14 and was just diagnosed with lung cancer. Nice big dataset; yes, there will be outliers at both ends but the bulk of the patients will fit nicely into the bell curve.
Trying to cherry pick – and project your own kid’s outcome- from the relatively small numbers of math majors who get hired at Jane Street – the data doesn’t tell you how much money your kid will make.
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Directionally, is it an improvement over the past decade or so where colleges were sorted according to the average salary of the entire graduating class? IMO, all it does is confirm what people knew all along: that engineering and quant focused degrees have higher ROIs, at least in the first half-dozen or so years following graduation. Everything else is kind of silly.
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Yet I prefer playing the odds.
Agree it’s directionally better- but the numbers don’t explain why salaries in Palo Alto are higher than in Omaha, even for the same major. Comparing Ohio State mechanical engineering to U Mass…does anyone think U Mass is going to have more students ending up in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis vs. Boston, Hartford and Providence?
I met someone this weekend who very confidently explained to me why UIUC is “second rate” for her kid’s projected major. (It’s not second rate. It’s highly regarded by employers, has terrific faculty with incredible bench strength with it’s grad program, research dollars, facilities, etc.) And the “better ROI” is a private U in a high priced region which is most decidedly a destination program for kids who cannot get into places like UIUC! You could argue all day-- or just smile and nod which is what I did…
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What is their projected major?
You are mellowing out.