<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>