Tufts vs Harvard vs Vanderbilt vs Upenn

Mastadon
Sat, 23 Apr 2016 16:46:44 +0000

The category just above Humanities Majors is for CS Majors, and unfortunately, none of the schools had a large enough sample size to be listed. The significance of this is that College Factual uses Payscale’s data for it’s CS ranking.

This means the College Factual ranking you posted cannot be trusted.

So, for CS the only valid data we have is the Penn data you provided and the Tufts data I provided which is

Penn $95,000 average, $135 max
Tufts $90,000 average, $130 max (but a few years older and trends have been upward)
Harvard - no data

As a cross check we can sort the schools in the Payscale CS subject ranking by early career salary and compare the top schools to Tufts and Penn. The top 5 are:

Columbia $98,900
Cal $96,400
Stanford $96,200
MIT $95,000
CMU $89,400

Note that Payscale uses the median salary rather than the average salary (used for Tufts and Penn).

All the salaries listed are within about plus or minus 5% of $95,000 and Tufts could range anywhere from near the bottom to the top of the range depending on the correction factor one applies to adjust for the age of the data.