<p>Starting salary data is, IMHO, always a little funny to look at. Starting salaries for BS degrees even harder to make any real conclusions about. Many of the better performing BS people go straight into grad school and so don’t figure into that data. Some people go into startups which typically pay less but have other perks (stock options, etc.) that can make them very attractive.</p>
<p>The company I worked for, a large aerospace company, used to publish a lot of salary data. Coming from MIT, I had one of the highest starting salaries for a new hire. So, they did differentiate. However, when you looked at the salary ranges over time, the lowest to highest salary for new hires was THE lowest range for any given number of years of experience. So, your school got you a SLIGHT bump, but after that it was your engineering talent that drove salary increases.</p>
<p>One interesting thing you could see in the graphs was that the average salary for engineering started a steady decline after about 10 years. The top of the range (actually the 90th percentile) still showed a growth although the rate of growth started to slow at that point. Why did this happen? Well, some of the higher paid engineers were moving out of the engineering pool at that point and moving into management, bringing the average down. The top kept growing as some of the top engineers, who stayed in engineering, became “subject area experts” and were rewarded as well as non-executive managers at my company. But they were were smaller in number.</p>
<p>So, salaries are more a function of who you are and not as much as where you went to school. However, more of the talented individuals do go to top schools, skewing the data in those schools favor.</p>