<p>William Hill: If you are really interested in this, take a look at this NY Times website piece from 2009: <a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/do-elite-colleges-produce-the-best-paid-graduates/[/url]”>http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/do-elite-colleges-produce-the-best-paid-graduates/</a></p>
<p>Note that 5 years ago, the median Harvard salary for mid-career alumni – what would be equivalent to your $91,000 median salary for New Jersey police officers – was about $125,000. Even if we ignore any wage increases in the past 5 years (and on a macro level wages have not increased much over that period), that’s a pretty hefty difference. It also shows that the median starting salary for new Harvard grads 5 years ago was about $60,000, which is a lot more than median starting salary for New Jersey police officers.</p>
<p>What’s more, the two figures are not really comparable. All police officers are pretty much police officers, but Harvard graduates do all kinds of things, some of which have absolutely terrible starting pay (like being an actor, a writer, or an artist, working with public health NGOs in Africa, or working in a biology research lab while you do your medical school applications), and some of which have obscene starting pay (like working for a large management consulting firm). No starting NJ police officer was making more than 5% more or less than the median, and no experienced NJ police officer was making much more than 200% of the median, or much less than 75% of it. With new Harvard grads, some were already making almost 200% of the median, and some probably less than half, and with experienced Harvard alumni quite a few may have been making 10, 20, 100 times the median. The average annual salary of the Harvard group would be much, much higher than the average annual salary of the police officers, by far more than the $35,000 difference in the medians.</p>
<p>Also, the Harvard data tend to be a little misleading, because they exclude any Harvard graduates with advanced degrees, which – hello! – means at least 80% of Harvard graduates. (Of all the people I knew at my Harvard-like college, the only people who never picked up advanced degrees were a few journalists and writers, some stock traders, and people who went into businesses their family owned. Plus one real estate developer.) The median salary data come from only a small, unrepresentative sampling of each Harvard cohort. </p>