<p>Caltech students make nearly $70K with a B.S. If you make it through Caltech, you’re automatically going to be considered uber smart and very hard working. Generally, you’re also going to be a stable person because the workload can be stressful and youthe handled it. You knowto how toI manage your time and stay on task. And you will already have research experience under your belt because research opportunities are unusually accessible at Caltech. Its not just branding. You might get as much preparation elsewhere im a place ranked lower, but you would have to make sure it happens and communicate that well. That is generally true for other top rated schools as well. Remember that a course taught at a top school may be much more difficult than a course with the same name at a lower ranked school. On the other hand I previewed a course in my area of graduate studies offered at one of the top engineering schools, and I found it to be very seriously lacking. I suspect the prof was trained in a related area, not the area he was teaching. So, there are exceptions to the quality one souls expect.</p>
<p>Per the Ivy League Earnings Myth article cited above:</p>
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<p>No wonder the top 20 schools have an application explosion - you just need to apply to raise your income :).</p>
<p>They don’t, necessarily. We have neighbors, about our same age, who both attended Princeton. My husband and I attended Miami (of OH) and he attended Ohio State for Law. And, hm, here we are living in the same neighborhood. 
We like to express astonishment about that when they mention they went to Princeton. Again. :D</p>
<p>My best friend attended Olivet Nazarene, graduated top of her class, and went to med school. She’s now director of Pathology at her hospital.</p>
<p>Another friend went to Cornell. He manages the produce department down at Whole Foods.</p>
<p>It’s the brand name! When you go to a Ralph Lauran store you know you will most possibly get great quality products. (If you can afford the price) When you go to Walmart, you can expect some products with great quality but with a very low percentage of chance.</p>
<p>Recruiters know when they go to top schools they almost always get very smart people - as long as these students’ personality is acceptable their smarts and performance is usually not a problem. If the recruiters go to lower ranking schools they can find tresures for sure, but very rarely compare to go to top schools. That’s why most high paying job recruiters go to top schools only, to save time and effort.</p>
<p>These comparative salary studies all seem to be based on Payscale data which is at best a very flawed data base. It’s not a systematic, scientifically constructed survey; it’s based entirely on unverified, self-selected reports by individuals. And notice that it reflects Bachelors degree holders only; anyone who has a Masters, Ph.D., M.D., J.D., M.B.A., D.D.S. or any other advanced degree is excluded from the data set. At many schools, that’s going to exclude most of the top earners because their best and brightest tend to go on and earn advanced degrees. At my D1’s LAC, about 80% of the graduates go on to earn advanced degrees, not necessarily straight out of college but at some point in their lives. The 20% who don’t go beyond a Bachelors are certainly not representative of the school as a whole; and frankly, they may tend to skew toward the lower part of the class.</p>
<p>On the other hand, many of the top schools in the Payscale surveys are engineering schools. Not surprising, when you think about it, because engineering is a field where with a Bachelors you can go straight into a comfortable professional job, and many engineers never go beyond a Bachelors because they don’t need to. But no effort is made here to control for occupation or major. So an engineering school that’s entirely or mostly engineers is going to look better in the Payscale ranking than an engineering school that’s part of a larger university. Do we really think Worcester Polytechnicle Institute (WPI) (#13 in the Payscale ROI ranking) engineers earn more money than Cornell (#20) engineers? Or is it that engineers make more money than non-engineers holding only a Bachelors degree, and engineers represent a larger fraction of WPI’s graduates than Cornell’s, given that the latter is a larger and more diverse university? For that matter, it could that right down the line, Cornell engineers earn as much or more than WPI engineers; Cornell business majors make as much or more than WPI business majors; and so on, but WPI still comes out on top because engineering is a higher-paying profession for those holding only a bachelors and WPI has a larger proportion of its grads in engineering. (These are all just hypotheticals, mind you, but I think they illustrate my point). </p>
<p>Kinda dumb basis for comparison, if you ask me.</p>
<p>^ agreed. Payscale data is mostly useless because it’s self-reported. The people who are making $200k+ are likely going to be too busy to care enough to go online and post about it. Likewise, those who are making lower salaries might be less inclined to go online and advertise it. Many alumni today probably aren’t even aware that Payscale exists.</p>
<p>As you suggested, it could also be that their graduate education is what got them the high-paying job (e.g. companies recruiting at the graduate institution), not their alma mater. This distinction is lost in Payscale data.</p>
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<p>Feeling glee over something like this is as petty and tacky as HYPSMXYZ alumni feeling superior for having graduated from an elite university. You’d be surprised at how many of those alumni have genuine humility over this.</p>
<p>On the off-chance that someone here might be interested in data based on juried research, as opposed to opinions based on anecdotal evidence and off-the-cuff “analysis” of flawed data sets that have dominated the thread so far, consider the following, from Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, “How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third Decade of Research.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.</p>
<p>“We found little evidence to suggest that measures of institutional quality [most commonly defined as selectivity of students] have more than a trivial and statistically significant, direct impact on overall occupational status.” Studies cited include 1986 follow-up of 1972 graduates; 1994 follow-up of 1985 graduates; and 1974-75 and 1992-93 follow-ups of 1957 graduates. All three studies reported “remarkably consistent results,” and all three “introduced statistical controls for salient confounding influences.”[468]</p>
<p>However, evidence suggests that “attending a selective a selective college enhances occupational attainment in specific professions such as medicine and law. … [one study, after controlling for various factors, showed] the academic selectivity of the college attended had a statistically significant, positive influence on admission to medical school. … [another study showed] attending one of the 74 most selective private colleges in the United States significantly increased one’s likelihood of completing a high-status professional degree (that is, M.D., J.D., M.B.A.). … In both studies the effect is nonlinear and generally accrued only to those students attending the most selective or elite institutions in the country. … Such institutions, at most, educated about 1 or 2 percent of all four-year college students in the national postsecondary system. For the remaining 98 percent or so of all four-year college students, the selectivity of the institution made little or no difference.”[469]</p>
<p>“We found a small body of evidence to suggest that attending a selective college confers a modest advantage on job attainment and career mobility. The evidence, however, is somewhat complex and suggests that college quality may signal an individual’s ability to employers rather than conferring unique skills that make for better job performance. Data from graduates of accounting programs in 82 universities [showed that] measures of institutional quality such as student body selectivity and institutional resources were both significantly and positively related to the number of job offers an individual received from the eight largest and most prestigious accounting-consulting firms in the region. However, after one year on the job, supervisors’ ratings of job performance and promotability were unrelated to institutional resources and actually had a significant, negative association with institutional selectivity.” [469-70]</p>
<p>With regard to earnings, all of the 27 studies reported were based on 11 pre-existing data sets with limitations that “simply do not permit one to introduce controls for all, or even most, of the important confounding influences. Consequently [says one researcher], ‘what looks like an effect of attending an elite college may really be an effect of unmeasured preexisting potential in academic or earning potential.’” [472]</p>
<p>With that important caveat, “although there are some clear exceptions, the weight of the evidence suggests that measures of institutional quality, and particularly student body selectivity, have statistically significant, positive impacts on subsequent earnings. Our best estimate is that, net of other influences … attending a college with a 100-point higher average SAT score (or ACT equivalent) is associated with about 2 to 4 percent higher earnings in later life. … When differential tuition costs are taken into account … the positive effect of attending a selective institution is reduced but does not disappear. … There is also evidence to suggest that the impact on earnings is nonlinear. Only those elite institutions at the very top of the selectivity distribution may have a subsequent impact on earnings.” [473]</p>
<p>“Aside from various measures of institutional selectivity, we uncovered only one institutional quality measure, faculty-student ratio, that was found to have s significant, positive net effect on earnings across individual samples.”[474]</p>
<p>“Measures of individual ambition are almost universally absent in investigations of the impact of college quality on earnings. This absence should probably come as no great surprise, because measuring ambition in a way that predicts one’s future economic success is a nontrivial challenge. … In short, elite, highly selective colleges may simply recruit and enroll students who would have a high earnings capacity no matter where they went to college.” Looking at two independent data sets (1995 followup on 1976 graduates, 1986 followup of 1972 graduates), when one study controlled for ambition by the number of applications students made to selective colleges, both data sets showed “the effect of college selectivity on earnings was reduced to a level that was trivial and nonsignificant.”[475]</p>