UChicago: Bad Bang for the $ ?

JHS
Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:25:42 +0000

for the life of me I cannot figure out the way they came up the “30 year returns” figure. What they called everyone every year to fax the salary/tax return over?



No, what they did was to get the current year’s compensation income from graduates of each of the past 30 years (but only graduates with no additional degrees, who were somebody’s full-time employee), and then use the median of each school’s qualifying and reporting graduates from that particular class, and added up the medians of each of the 30 classes. Then, from the resulting number, they subtracted the median income of 34 classes of mere high school grads (i.e., what the median person would have earned anyway without going to college, supposedly, including what she would have earned during the four years her college friends were in college). I think they also subtracted the cost of that particular college, so that the resulting number is supposed to be the pure marginal profit earned by going to a particular college rather than heading into the workforce after high school.

I’m being simplistic. It’s more complicated. I still don’t buy it.