Top Colleges for Finance, Tech and Consulting WSJ Article

Data10
Mon, 01 Apr 2024 20:27:05 +0000

BKSquared:

Agree there is the usual question of causation vs correlation.

Yes, you can find correlations between salary and all kinds of factors. For example, I expect you’d find a correlation between salary and height, salary and eye color, salary and which items your parents bought at the grocery store, etc. Nobody would assume that any of the above determines your salary. Yet it seems fairly common to assume that college name determines salary, with no influence from the individual student.

Such analyses imply that if a high achieving MIT admit chooses to attend his/her local flagship to save money, he/she suddenly becomes the average student at the flagship who is far less high achieving and may have a 30% chance of failing to graduate.

The individual student and related individual student variables influences their post graduate outcome. It seems silly to ignore this. That’s not to say that college name has no influence. College name absolutely has a notable influence in finance and consulting. The degree of influence in tech is more debatable, particular for engineering. However, looking at average salary without controlling for any individual student or college selectivity variables is not going to produce meaningful results.