Salary Potential by School

tk21769
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:39:02 +0000

ignoring people with higher degrees makes no sense. You end up looking at incomes of a small proportion of graduates who have no higher degree 15 years out of college. universities where more top students go on to grad school are punished through payscale measurement. Self-reporting also makes the statistics close to useless.



These are real issues but I would not go so far as to say the statistics are useless. People with higher degrees are ignored deliberately. Otherwise, how do you separate the impact of the higher degree from the impact of the original degree on earnings?

Engineering school numbers are labeled as such. They are separated.
And the earnings patterns for engineering v. liberal arts are exactly what I would have predicted. Engineers start out strong but plateau. Liberal arts graduates catch up with, then surpass their earnings.

I prefer the Baccalaureate-to-PhD numbers as quality metrics, though they have their own problems.