<p>There’s alot more to college than the salary you earn but its an important factor in evaluating the incredibly high investment of a bachelor’s degree. The Payscale.com report analyzes the beginning and mid-year salaries of college graduates (undergraduates only) by school and ranks them as a group with all majors lumped together. Its upsetting to see that Emory (which is 20th in Best Universities in the US News & World Report) drops to #205 in salary earned at mid-career. All the other top 20 schools produce much higher wage earners. What could possibly explain such low wage earners from such a highly ranked university? Since the report doesn’t control for geography, perhaps Emory graduates tend to stay in the South and incomes are less there than in other parts of the country? That still doesn’t seem to be enough to explain such a huge drop. I find this very disturbing… any thoughts on reasons for the low salaries of Emory graduates?</p>
<p>It could be the careers that students pursue or don’t pursue. Perhaps less students pursue high/decent wage professions. For example, most of the other top 20s have engineering/applied sciences schools (of which maybe 1k or more of the UG student body ends up in many cases), and this will bring the mid-wage salary up (in fact, other schools, especially peers have plenty more undergraduate professional schools). Also, I think many other schools are better at things like pre-health placement (if the pre-meds aren’t getting into med. school, and then give up and don’t have an idea of what to pursue, it will certainly delay things). At Emory, it could be many students having a “high wage pre-professional or bust” attitude, without a lot of honesty in the advising and self-realization in the process. This leads to narrow goals and little to no back-ups. I also suppose Emory would do better than this despite having less UG professional school if it were like Chicago and maybe had a stronger econ. program (that could push more ECAS students on to wall street or somewhere) or had more success in getting students to go into academia and be successful. Usually, the pre-prof. endeavors are a lot more high-risk and then even if you get into the prof. school, then students accumulate a bit of debt (whereas, if Emory was better at placing more/promoting students into well-funded science Ph.D programs, or even non-science, you may have less of the “oh no, I didn’t get into x professional school, now I’m screwed for life” situations). Part of it could be on the student body mentality toward career goals and how some of them are extremely inflexible and perhaps not creative, and part of it is perhaps the lackluster advising that may even perpetuate such attitudes sometimes. </p>
<p>Even with all of this said, many other ranking agencies would actually consider Emory to be decent (perhaps not great, because this place is very expensive, but not as bad as this, which honestly, I don’t expect Emory to perform but so well in…) even in this category, so I can’t say for sure if I’m on to something. And don’t say it “dropped” to that, the two rankings are unrelated. They measure two different things in two different ways. I mean, again, the methodology of this one seems to differ from those who would label the place a best value (and other publications that take into account return on investment).</p>
<p>Note that the Payscale data you show is only for students whose highest degree earned is bachelor. Since Emory is pre-professional oriented, most of “above-average” kids would pursue advanced/graduate degrees.</p>
<p>For instance, look at the number/capita of Emory Pre-law school students who get into Harvard and Yale. Emory is usually ranked 16~17th most represented out of all the universities (liberal+national).</p>
<p>SOURCE: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/2997104-post25.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/2997104-post25.html</a></p>
<p>Also, many of Emory Undergrads are pre-meds. We usually have a few hundred people applying every year, and the acceptance rate for those with 30+ 3.6+ is 88%~90%.</p>
<p>Source: Emory Career Center (you find it…too lazy)</p>
<p>How does Payscale collect information? Is it by voluntary surveys? That might be a reason… But it would be something that would affect every school.</p>
<p>Overall, it doesn’t matter. </p>
<p>If you’re going into the technology, medicine, or corporate world, you’ll be making six figures in a few years.
If you’re going into the social sciences, you probably won’t be making six figures ever.</p>
<p>There’s no reason to overanalyze it based on payscale’s rank. Why would you care about average salary of a school when you are a CS major? Essentially, you’re lumping yourself into the same category as the English majors if you do that.</p>
<p>But, I guess schools that churn out lots of engineers have the best rankings. Not much better for average salary for undergrads than an engineering major. I didn’t look at the survey because it’s probably a waste of time, but I’d bet Tech is ranked high -same for MIT, CMU, Caltech, and I bet even no-name schools nobody has heard of. </p>
<p>Not that they shouldn’t be ranked highly in a salary ranking, but undergrad pay scale rankings are always good towards engineering powerhouses for obvious reasons. One should realize this limitation when looking at it.</p>
<p>We don’t have engineering, so we can’t take advantage of 75k+ salaries bumping our average up.
So that probably accounts for much of our disparity.</p>
<p>And I don’t think the “jobs in the south” is a good reason.</p>
<p>I also think most elite schools have a very high concentrations as pre-professionals, so I don’t think that’s the reason either.</p>
<p>Bernie might be onto something with the “high wage job or bust without much honesty…” statement though.</p>
<p>Payscale has become a new obsession for many. Note, however, that it only has 525 self-reported data points out of 121,000 living Emory alumni. The website is effectively useless in every way.</p>
<p>I’d suggest searching for “payscale” on CC … there have been many lengthy discussions on payscale in the past. My short version of the conclusion … IMO, payscale is essentially useless.</p>
<p>aluminum: I recognize that many elite schools have lots of pre-meds for example, but when you have like an amount that would equal like 1/5-1/4 of graduating class applying and only like 46-53% gaining entry, it kind of hurts (also, I think that while there are many who still gain admission to top 10 med schools, it’s likely a bit less than before. Along with the increasingly competitive nature, It’s been argued that despite what the incoming stats say, Emory students, pre-prof or not, are not necessarily of the same mentality/type as they were before. Perhaps more of the students back in the day w/slightly lower stats. were a little more ambitious or had traits more conducive to getting into highly ranked prof. schools that require more than just high stats.). JHU has the same amount and gets like 65-70% in. I think Emory may do fine with pre-law as was posted earlier.</p>