Hundreds of Colleges Provide No Income Boost

Parents Forum
161

Well, I don’t know if I would call it a fetish, as I doubt they are inhabited by some form of celestial spirit. That said, I think one reason they are frequently used in examples is that they show the dramatic example of folks say in non-quant majors (say English or History) and being recruited for fairly analytical positions. Thus, that ability of intellectual dexterity becomes one that is intriguing for most. Certainly one would not see the same recruitment to a consulting firm, say from Chico State who has the same major at Princeton.

Tacking to another point, I do find it ironic, that much of the discussion is centered around the recruitment of those that have a high aptitude for analytical abilities, but in my own experiences, is that the most oft reason I don’t retain someone or don’t decide to continue with a consulting contract is not because of “hard skills”, but rather the lack of “soft skills”, which in my opinion, are much harder to teach, if teachable at all.

162

I can’t teach empathy. (soft skill). I can teach various communication techniques to someone who is literate and writes well. SOME of those communication techniques (i.e. active listening, driving consensus, managing conflict) may “feel” like empathy when done well, but it’s not.

We can’t take a psychopath and turn him/her into Mother Theresa.

But Boola- I agree with your premise.

163

“reason I don’t retain someone or don’t decide to continue with a consulting contract is not because of “hard skills”, but rather the lack of “soft skills”, which in my opinion, are much harder to teach, if teachable at all.”

Great point, boola. And the SAT doesn’t measure soft skills in the least.

164

Maybe I don’t get the context of this thread… but what exactly are we trying to pinpoint in terms of “income boost” ? To throw a number out there, lets say the average college grad earns $50k after graduation… is measuring ‘income boost’ trying to determine if this kid get paid $55k or instead $45k? I think where I differ here, and maybe we should re-title this to “top 5% income bracket” - I mean what is the point of comparing an ivy to some State U if the cost differential is $50k per year or $200k over a 4 year period and saying the ivy kid gets $55k while the State U kid gets $45k, so there is ‘income boost’ ? That is nonsensical. When I and others are referring to working for the top IBs, or Consulting firms or the top tech giants, I am talking about a kid coming out with a 4yr degree and making $100k+ maybe $150k their first year. Now that is what I call ‘income boost’ – and I think in this regard things have not changed much… if you are an ivy grad majoring in sociology (but you have taken stats, econ and other stuff) the odds of you getting paid $100k+ at a top firm in Manhattan, San Fran or Chicago is way better than a similar sociology major from State U. So apples to apples, if you are gunning for a top 5% income bracket type of salary, the top schools are still very much the ticket to getting there and yes, Martha… they do provide an ‘income boost’.

165

Some of us don’t care about an income boost, however, because we’ve worked hard enough that our kids don’t HAVE to chase the highest-paying jobs (unless they want to).

What’s that old quote that goes like such (I am paraphrasing and don’t know the exact quote or source):

I must study politics, so that my children have the liberty to study math, so that their children have the liberty to study painting and music and the arts.

That’s how I feel. I want my kid pursuing what THEY want to do – and of course be self-sufficient, but it’s not a money grab and that’s not how I evaluate college. It’s an experience. I’d still rather my kid go to Northwestern than U of Illinois even though U of I grads might make more in certain fields (such as engineering). What they make is SO not the point of it all.

166

“When I and others are referring to working for the top IBs, or Consulting firms or the top tech giants, I am talking about a kid coming out with a 4yr degree and making $100k+ maybe $150k their first year. Now that is what I call ‘income boost’ – and I think in this regard things have not changed much… if you are an ivy grad majoring in sociology (but you have taken stats, econ and other stuff) the odds of you getting paid $100k+ at a top firm in Manhattan, San Fran or Chicago is way better than a similar sociology major from State U.”

It never occurred to me to care one way or the other whether my kids would work for top IB/consulting firms/tech giants, or whether their salaries would top $100K their first year out. College isn’t a vocational training ground. Happy, healthy, gainfully employed and self-sufficient is all I cared about, not money-chasing. I did the money-chasing precisely so they don’t have to.

167

I think the real issue is kids who, post grad, finish no better, in many/most respects, than if they had skipped college and just gotten 4 years experience somewhere.

That’s the missing “boost” issue with some colleges. Including income, but not limited to salary. “Income” seems to be a shorthand for various sorts of gains from the college experience.

168

@pizzagirl, your points are well taken, but the point of the thread is to determine whether some colleges DO provide an income boost over others…and what exactly is an “income boost”… how do we define it, how do we calculate it, blah blah.

I guess you are saying that for some, it doesn’t matter whether one college provides an income boost over another since this is not the whole point of a college education for some people. I’m with you on that, personally. But, I think the point needs to be made that choosing a NU over U of I for engineering, for example, actually could be more likely to provide real income boost over time due to the people you interact with, the connections made, and the breadth of thought developed by universities such as NU.

There are many on this board who are still in the position of the “politician” in your example, who are seeking the very biggest bang for their buck in terms of ROI in hard dollars…so that their children can choose more freely one day. This person might think they are better off choosing instate U of I over full pay NU for engineering, given immediate and even ten-year-out “average” returns, but I’m not sure that the statistics are truly capable of capturing the real returns of an NU over a U of I, even in terms of dollars.

169

@lookingforward,

I couldn’t agree with you more. The conversation really needs to focus on, at what point should a kid think more in terms of a vocation or trade vs. a college education. There is a point where a low-level college offers very little benefit to a low-level student studying certain types of things.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to talk about, because nobody wants to shatter the dreams of the 2.7 gpa/18 ACT kid who wants to study poetry, but who in reality can barely write and reads at a low level. A fine, fine thing to study…but there are colleges out there that will accept such a student and then make this kid take out a lot of loans for a level of education that is no better than high school.

170

The government database referenced in the original post is comparing the average income for students who attended that college to the overall US average income for students who did not attend college, and implying that the difference in those two numbers primarily relates to the college choice. There are several obvious flaws with such a comparison relating to a biased sample. The HYPSM… type colleges are selective enough to choose students who are more likely to be successful in their respective fields than most students who choose to not attend college. There is also a difference in average SES, family role models/connections, etc. Obviously choice of field and location have a large impact on earnings as well. For example, some example colleges ranked by the 10-year salary as listed in the government database are below:

1 -- SUNY Downstate Medical Center: 122k

7 -- United States Merchant Marine Academy: $89k

16 -- Stevens Institute of Technology: $83k

21 -- University of Maryland-Baltimore: $80k

43 -- University of Colorado-Denver: $74k

47 -- Columbia University: $73k

51 -- Cornell University: $71k

63 -- Dartmouth University: $67k

69 -- Yale University: $66k

…

429 -- Swarthmore: $49k

I would not assume the if you want a high salary to choose Stevens, University of Maryland, ,University of Colorado and similar over the Ivies on the list above or LACs. Instead I expect a larger portion of students are pursuing high paying fields at most of the higher salary schools. In short while some of the stats are interesting, I would not give the earning numbers significant weight in choosing a college, nor do I think it is a problem that students at schools like the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music generally earn less than typical high school grads. They have different goals than earning the highest possible salary, and the college may be doing a good job in helping them meet those goals.

A more interesting report would involve trying to eliminate the biased sample by comparing similar students. Payscale does this to some extent for similar majors, and there have been some papers that try to compare similar students. for example the paper at http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159.pdf found that the selectivity of the colleges a student a applied to was a better predictor of earnings than the selectivity of the college a student attended.

171

@dfdbfb I have great respect for Rationalism, but I am an Empiricist at heart. My reasoning is based on similar sources to the articles I posted earlier. From the APA report is the following:

“Psychological tests and assessments have been used in personnel selection since World War I, but until the 1980s, it was assumed that the determinants of success varied extensively from job to job, and from organization to organization. In particular, it was widely believed that tests that were highly effective predictors of success in one job or one organization might turn out to be useless as predictors of success in other similar jobs or organizations, and that it would be necessary to build selection tests one job and one organization at a time. Several decades of research by psychologists Frank Schmidt, PhD, and John Hunter, PhD, showed that this assumption was incorrect, and that it was possible to establish clear, simple, and generalizable links between broad individual difference variables, such as general cognitive ability or personality traits and success in a wide range of jobs.”

@PickOne1 Jim Manzi explained the process well. These firms start with an SAT screen, then they screen for tough analytical courses and GPA, and finally 3 rounds of interview. Some of the interviews are to see how “clubbable” these folks are, but most interviews are designed “to understand how the candidate can reason analytically – translating an unrehearsed real world problem to a mathematical representation, doing the math, and then translating this back to a real world solution, with awareness of all the simplifications that were necessary – under pressure.” Apparently only a small fraction survive each and every level of evaluation. So, in short, I agree with you.

I assumed the system is designed to screen out elite grads who got in through connections, and also to catch those who should but did not end up in an elite. If so, then I am all for it.

I am not sure I agree with the notion that weak high school preparation means the students come from weak schools though. It is more likely weak students choose weak preparation because they lack cognitive ability and or conscientiousness. In the Duke study, it is noted that the switching behaviour is also prevalent among legacies, yet it would be hard for me to claim that this group is under-privileged. If they are under-prepared, then this under-preparedness is self-inflicted.

172

The last sentence should have been “If they are under-prepared, then this under-preparedness is self-inflicted to a certain degree.”

173

It seems to me that the average reader of CC is aspiring to enroll at a top tier school. Certainly the majority of the posts I see seem to target this group of schools. Therefore, in reading through this Thread I think the question is that for a similarly well qualified student who can get into top-tier private expensive school or can get into very good State U with instate tuition, the question of ‘income boost’ becomes certainly a factor to weigh in the decision.

As for the data and statistics I do not take issue with the averages posted by @data10 but I think again, with the caliber of students and aspirations of parents on CC that we are working with the top 10% of college aspirants. Consequently, taking the average 10 year out reported salary at Univ of Maryland or Univ of Colorado vs. similar at Cornell, Yale or Swarthmore misses the point of the highest achieving decile or quartile. I think if you could slice the data and see what the top 10% or top 25% of graduates from that list of schools makes 10 years out, the statistics would swing wildly in favor of the private elite schools. There are many well-to-do kids and some from poor families who choose to work for non profits or seek careers with very low income for personal reasons, this biases the data and if we looked at the right-hand tails of the curve I would believe that the private top-tier schools provide very significant income boost versus the similar top decile or top quartile of income earners from State U. If the data contradicts this opinion I would be curious to see it.

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@ Pizzagirl - The quote is from John Adams, and it goes “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

Wealth in America is a fascinating topic in that wealthy families rarely conserve their wealth past three generations. Typically, the first generation works hard to establish wealth, the second generation manages it, and the third generation fritters it away on liberal arts degrees at expensive LAC’s. Then the cycle repeats.

175

I get tired of all this blame on liberal arts. Just saying. Someday, maybe we’ll have colleges that just teach engineering or accounting, no gen eds. But for now, the colleges offer a variety of opportunities, including the chance to become better educated, not just train for some job as if they were vo-tech schools.

176

@Zinhead: I’m gonna issue a call for evidence on your causal link there.

177

Re #173

Inheritors who squader wealth are often spending on things much more expensive and much less valuable long term than college education.

Re #174

Engineering major degree programs must contain significant liberal arts including H/SS to be ABET accredited.

178

@dfbdfb - Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.

179

Do you guys actually know any liberal arts graduates?

Do you watch TV? The content is typically thought up, created, and produced by liberal arts grads. Do you take vacations? Ever visit a museum or a historical site? The exhibits and art are produced/archived/restored/preserved by liberal arts grads.

Read a newspaper? It ain’t the nursing and accounting grads interviewing the mayor of the corrupt city in your region, or digging in to explain why incarceration rates are so high vs. the rest of the world.

These comments are so tiresome- besides being wildly incorrect.

And my guess is that none of you know third generation (and fourth generation) mega wealth. The smart ones have set up trusts to preserve capital into the fifth generation- even the coke-addicted grandson who keeps driving his Porsche into a wall will have trouble “frittering away” capital which is locked tight inside a well crafted estate plan. And the likelihood that four years of college tuition – even in a very big family- will spend down the corpus of a large family fortune is quite remote.

What billionaire is going to worry about four years of college tuition???

180

@blossom - Have you ever looked at who makes up the administrative staff at large corporations? Most of the younger ones have liberal arts degrees, and they are doing work that a generation ago did not require a college degree.

Yes, a liberal arts degree from Yale, Stanford or the University of Michigan will get the degree holder a job and potential career. However, the history or English major from a directional state school or underfunded private college will struggle with both job or career and will likely end up doing something that does not require a college degree. A large percentage of these kids would have been off pursuing a vocational field, or not attending college.

Here is a good article that highlights that trend.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/05/28/half-of-college-grads-are-working-jobs-that-dont-require-a-degree/

Some excerpts:

“If only my son were a STEM kid, meaning that he were interested in science, technology, engineering or math. The McKinsey study says that 75% of those grads are in jobs requiring a four-year degree. Instead my child will be at the bottom of the bar graph, just two slots up from visual and performing arts, where only 43% are in jobs requiring a four-year degree. He is likely to graduate with a social science degree, where only 54% have jobs that require a four-year diploma.”

“Yet more sobering news that I fear will affect my son: 40% of grads from the nation’s top 100 colleges couldn’t find jobs in their chosen field. In this measurement, social science grads are at the very bottom. Only 36% are working in their field of choice. Visual and performing arts grads are doing better, at 42%. At least there is a consolation prize if my kid gets into a top 100 school: He will earn 17%-19% more than students from other schools.”

“But back to more depressing news: Six times as many graduates are working in retail or hospitality as had originally planned. Since there are 1.7 million grads who are getting bachelor’s degrees this year, that means 120,000 young people are working as waiters, Gap salespeople, and baristas because it was the only work they could find.”

“I talked to Andre Dua, a McKinsey director who co-leads the firm’s education practice in North America, in hopes of finding a shred of encouraging news for my would-be liberal arts graduate. Will the employment outlook be as dim five years from now? At first Dua demurred, saying “your career prospects are highly variable depending on where you go and what you studied on the one hand, and what you do to prepare yourself on the other hand.” In other words, if you’re a STEM kid who does lots of internships, you’ll probably be fine. If you’re a liberal arts kid, not so much.”