Tufts vs Harvard vs Vanderbilt vs Upenn

Mastadon
Fri, 29 Apr 2016 21:47:09 +0000

With regard to the College Scorecard data, the salaries tend to track the mix of majors pretty closely, with the schools that have a high mix of professions registering higher early career salaries, but the schools with a higher mix of the arts tend to gain ground (or in some cases surpass) more professions oriented schools by mid career.

The one exception is Harvard, which seems to be higher than one would expect.

If one digs further, though one finds out that the salary database for College Scorecard is derived from the government’s college loan database - but wait - Harvard has a no-loan policy for financial aid…

If one digs into the financial aid section of the College Scorecard data one finds that only 3% of Harvard Students have US Government issued student loans. Harvard should be commended for this, but in the context of this discussion it makes for a rather small sample size that compounds the error/bias inherent in the sampling method associated with the loan database.

So the other piece of data that we cannot trust is the College Scorecard salary data for Harvard.