<p>I haven’t looked at these Payscale rankings, but in the past every time I have looked at Payscale it has been next to useless. It excludes anyone with an advanced degree, which means probably 70-80% of the graduates of any college I care about. I think it effectively measures how many people are in family businesses. Against that background, a few engineering or accounting graduates, plus some entrepreneurs and professional athletes, can really move the averages one way, and government employees and private school teachers move it the other way. </p>
<p>Chicago’s “problem” probably boils down to too few heirs of family businesses, no engineering and accounting grads, and too many people in public or nonprofit sector jobs. When Chicago did its long-range plan a decade or so ago, one of the findings was that compared to peer institutions its alumni were heavily weighted to education and public service, and not to business careers. I think they have been trying to address that at the admissions level, but none of it will have shown up in “midcareer” analyses yet.</p>
<p>Here’s a concrete example: I have two cousins, siblings, who graduated from Chicago in the 90s, and thus might possibly be in the Payscale numbers. One was a physics major, then got a PhD in applied math, and makes a zillion dollars working for a financial trading firm. The other sibling was a political science major. She worked for a politician in Indonesia, then ran a successful congressional campaign in her hometown. She worked as a key staffer for that congressman for years, then left to run a successful statewide campaign, and was one of the leaders of a successful effort to legalize same-sex marriage in her state. She works as a lobbyist/organizer for unions in her state, and probably intends to run for office. So . . . two different careers, both pretty interesting, actually, and both directly relating to interests they developed at the University of Chicago, but only the low-paid one shows up in the Payscale numbers.</p>