WSJ Article, Payscale, 100K Club - Consolidated

dstark · August 3, 2008, 10:06am

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hawkette · August 3, 2008, 10:41am

I looked at a subset of the Payscale data for just the colleges ranked in the USNWR Top 40 National Universities and the USNWR Top 20 LACs.

Salary data has been presented for 51 of those 60 colleges (colleges with insufficient data were Wash U, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Wake Forest, Brandeis, W&M, U Rochester, Haverford, Claremont McKenna, US Naval Academy).

Here is how those 51 colleges compared based on the Median Mid-Career Salary information:

Rank , Median Mid-Career Salary , College

1 , $ 134,000 , Dartmouth
2 , $ 131,000 , Princeton
3 , $ 129,000 , Stanford
4 , $ 126,000 , Yale
4 , $ 126,000 , MIT
6 , $ 124,000 , Harvard
7 , $ 123,000 , Caltech
8 , $ 122,000 , Harvey Mudd
9 , $ 120,000 , U Penn
10 , $ 116,000 , Notre Dame
11 , $ 113,000 , U Chicago
12 , $ 112,000 , UC Berkeley
13 , $ 111,000 , Carnegie Mellon
14 , $ 110,000 , Cornell
14 , $ 110,000 , Rice
14 , $ 110,000 , Georgetown
17 , $ 109,000 , Brown
18 , $ 108,000 , Colgate
19 , $ 107,000 , Columbia
19 , $ 107,000 , Amherst
19 , $ 107,000 , Bowdoin
22 , $ 106,000 , Duke
22 , $ 106,000 , Georgia Tech
24 , $ 105,000 , Lehigh
25 , $ 104,000 , Vanderbilt
25 , $ 104,000 , Swarthmore
25 , $ 104,000 , Davidson
25 , $ 104,000 , W&L
29 , $ 103,000 , U Virginia
29 , $ 103,000 , Boston Coll
29 , $ 103,000 , Carleton
32 , $ 102,000 , Williams
33 , $ 101,000 , UCLA
33 , $ 101,000 , UCSD
33 , $ 101,000 , Pomona
36 , $ 99,600 , USC
37 , $ 97,900 , Wesleyan
38 , $ 96,100 , U Illinois
39 , $ 95,900 , Northwestern
40 , $ 95,600 , NYU
41 , $ 94,600 , Vassar
42 , $ 94,200 , Middlebury
43 , $ 93,000 , U Michigan
44 , $ 91,600 , Emory
45 , $ 87,800 , U Wisconsin
46 , $ 83,900 , Smith
47 , $ 83,700 , Hamilton
48 , $ 83,500 , Wellesley
49 , $ 81,600 , Oberlin
50 , $ 81,500 , U North Carolina
51 , $ 76,600 , Grinnell

Brown_man1987 · August 3, 2008, 10:52am

Can somebody enlighten me on how these numbers were obtained?

Everybody seems to be so quick to believe these numbers and draw ridiculous conclusions like “you’ll make more money if you go to RPI instead of Columbia and Brown” and they seem to be assuming that ONLY the school you go to determines mid-career salary.

There are so many factors OTHER THAN the school you go to that determine your mid-career salary.

dstark · August 3, 2008, 11:37am

I’m in my fifties and I get paid $80,000.

What is my financial situation?

How did my education affect my income? Are people who make more money better educated than I am? Smarter? How about people who make less?

What field do I work in and how does that affect my income?

What is my return on investment (college costs vs return on those college costs?

How much did my parents financial situation affect mine?

Can I look at the $80,000 number and answer the above questions?

Can I look at the above number and look at the colleges where the median is higher and come to the conclusion that the higher the median number, the better the school, the better the education?
Therefore, those that went to schools with higher medians are better educated than those that didn’t?

Why do some people use numbers without any context?

Why do some people use numbers without proof of causation?

The sun rises every morning. I wake up every morning and see that the sun has risen. Therefore, when I wake up, I cause the sun to rise.

For the people who think these numbers mean something, can you tell me how many people took part in this survey and how many from each school participated?

hawkette · August 3, 2008, 12:15pm

Dstark,
I think you underrate the intelligence of the average CC reader. My guess is that the vast majority understand that the Payscale numbers are not an ironclad, absolute indication of one’s earnings power at Mid-career, nor do they reflect an individual’s values in assessing careers, personal goals, etc. People will commonly break the indicated levels on the upside and the downside (the data provided is the median after all).

College-interested persons will regularly take into account many aspects of a college in forming their judgments (and unquestionably assign different weights to these individual “dots” of information). Matters such as student quality, classroom size, teaching quality, graduation rates, research reputation, financial/student resources, post-graduate opportunities, non-classroom features are frequently considered, not to mention issues of size, location, cost, social life, athletic life, etc.

A large majority of CC readers understand that data points such as Payscale can and should be considered with a wide assortment of other data points that help fill a larger picture (think of the Seurat painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jattee). IMO, you’re getting too hung up on criticizing a single dot.

Now, if the larger assortment of “dots” does not comport with a completely rosy view of your favored college(s), then….

dstark · August 3, 2008, 12:29pm

Hawkette, first off the school I went to scores pretty high.

What I don’t like is using numbers without context. Just like I said.

Nothing you said changes the fact that payscales numbers are just numbers without context.

You don’t know how many people participated in the survey, how many participated from each school, and how many lied.

Yet, you love to use those numbers.

You have a feeling those numbers are accurate.

Well, I have a feeling too. If payscale used the income of the students families going into the universities and the income of the students 15 years after, and looked at the changes, I think the school I went to would be number 1.

I don’t know what that means.

What do you think Hawkette? Incomes of the parents of students going into schools, income of the students 15 years later… what do you think the rankings would look like?

Schools like SF State would kick a@@. Cal Poly definitely would. :)

Payscales list would look a lot different.

dstark · August 3, 2008, 12:41pm

“I think you underrate the intelligence of the average CC reader.”

Hawkette, you and your averages. :)

I think some CC particpants are very bright, some not as bright. Some participants are intelligent in some areas, not so in others.

Some use numbers without context, some understand context is important. ;)

dstark · August 3, 2008, 12:47pm

"College-interested persons will regularly take into account many aspects of a college in forming their judgments (and unquestionably assign different weights to these individual “dots” of information). Matters such as student quality, classroom size, teaching quality, graduation rates, research reputation, financial/student resources, post-graduate opportunities, non-classroom features are frequently considered, not to mention issues of size, location, cost, social life, athletic life, etc. "

Yes. And after taking all these factors into account, let’s form a consensus. Let’s come up with a ranking of colleges that reflects everybody’s needs and wants. One that is accurate.

dstark · August 3, 2008, 12:49pm

“A large majority of CC readers understand that data points such as Payscale can and should be considered”

I hope not.

hawkette · August 3, 2008, 1:25pm

I hope you’re kidding on your expectation for a consensus ranking that reflects “everyone’s wants and needs” and is “accurate.” Good luck.

If part of your point is that some data “dots” are more sound than others, I would agree. The difference between you and I is that I think most CC readers understand the Payscale information and I respect their intelligence enough to let them decide on the degree to which they can/should rely on it in making their college judgments. I know that you don’t like it. I know also that you don’t like standardized test scores as an indication of student quality. Others may value such information differently.

As for my frequent use of data (including averages :eek:), I find this information much more reliable and convincing than anecdotal commentary or herd/bullying posting by partisans of a handful of schools. In my 2+ years of CC posting and extending my personal understanding of colleges across the USA, it has become clear to me that some colleges are vastly overrated and others significantly underrated. IMO, data can do a lot to illuminate “the truth” about these schools and often points to conclusions at odds with their conventional wisdom.

dstark · August 3, 2008, 1:55pm

Hawkette, I don’t know if there are schools that are overrated or underrated.

Depends on the person forming the opinion…

All the top 50 schools are great schools. All of them.

Everybody that has read your posts gets it. Maybe, outside of HYPS… Duke, Notre Dame, Vandy, I’m sure I’m missing a couple, are as good as any other school.

For some people, that is true.
Some people.

The use of data…

Let’s look at payscale. In some ways, I would like to believe that the numbers are accurate. That the numbers reflect the quality of the schools, and that the income numbers reflect the education you receive at the schools. That the higher the income number, the better the education.

Makes things easier, doesn’t it?

I would like to believe, but like Lewis Black, I have thoughts.

So to keep things simple, How many students participated in the survey? How many from each school?

To even consider the validity of the survey, I’d like to know the above and work from there. Since you find the data point relevant, can you tell me these answers?

As far as SAT scores. Again, it would make things simpler if SAT scores really measured intelligence and what a student brings to a school. If the average SAT score of a student body really measured the education a person receives at a school.

If the SAT really did, I would be a believer, but again I have thoughts.

kelseyg · August 3, 2008, 2:16pm

Severely flawed, isn’t it? Since the people who go to better schools are more likely to get high paying jobs (doctors, laywers, CEOs) just because of how smart they are in the first place. Does it correct for where applicants were accepted? How?

I’m more interested in finding out the statistics of someone who is accepted to Harvard and goes to a lower-ranked school, or one based on SAT or GPA.

hawkette · August 3, 2008, 2:52pm

Dstark,
Your response reflects a defensiveness that perhaps is warranted, given that your favored schools are those most frequently (and negatively) impacted when we get past the hype and opaqueness of the undefined and shrouded PA scores and actually look at some comparative data.

Your response to the presentation of data also reflects an inability to interpret with nuance. For you, the data must be black or be white… or it’s not useful at all. But much data is a shade of gray depending on the metric and, more importantly, how the result in one area of measurement holds together with other points of evidence. And my comments here are on only the aggregate level. As applied by a single individual, the grayness expands even further as individual values and needs are applied.

I agree that the USNWR Top 50 are all great colleges, but not in the same way as you and I certainly don’t apply equivalence to all, at least as measured on an institutional level. I mean this in the way that all of the teams in the NFL are good, but they’re not equally good. Some are good on the line, others in the offense, some in the defense, some with kicking, etc. But the best teams are those that can do it all, or nearly all.

The same goes in the corporate environment. Finance. Manufacturing. Marketing. Operations. Technology. Etc. A company being good at one or two of these might succeed in their industry, but is not likely to be considered a premier company. The best can do most or all of these things well.

I analogize this to comparing colleges, unlike some who say that one metric (PA score, or anything else for that matter) is the only factor worth looking at and forget everything else. Baloney! Which schools can attract the best students, teach/train them in the best learning setting, provide them the resources (financial and otherwise) that they need to succeed as students and to effectively position themselves for post-graduate life, and do it all while providing a non-classroom environment that positively supplements their academic experience. Lots of data points in there and certainly lots of gray (on the institutional and individual level), but nearly all worthwhile in my opinion.

As for the Payscale data, I repeat my confidence in the intelligence of the folks who consume the information. Used in conjunction with other data points, one may be able draw some conclusions or at least think of some questions for further investigation during the college selection process. I’m not scared of where the information may take the inquiry as I have confidence that such a probe starts a process that leads to the wheat being more fully and accurately separated from the chaff.

carolyn · August 3, 2008, 3:32pm

My guess is that the vast majority understand that the Payscale numbers are not an ironclad, absolute indication of one’s earnings power at Mid-career, nor do they reflect an individual’s values in assessing careers, personal goals, etc. People will commonly break the indicated levels on the upside and the downside (the data provided is the median after all).

Unfortunately, Hawkette, based on the comments made on this and other threads, I don’t know that you can say that “most” CC readers will take the time to actually consider how the data was obtained. Just read some of the threads where folks are enthusiastically taking this information as “proof” that they or their child made the right choice in college or considering adding different schools to their college lists because, well, golly, look how much money they’ll make as an alum!

I’m with dstark on this one. The datapoints may be fun to look at, but as for proof of any college’s ability to make an individual student wealthy and successful, or even offer the opportunity for doing so, they’re not much in terms of reliablity or predictability. Yet, that is exactly how payscale, and the journalists reporting on payscales “survey” are positioning them.

But, I always appreciate the time you spend to pull all of the information you share here together. :)

hawkette · August 3, 2008, 7:35pm

Carolyn,
I appreciate your comments and I guess we’ll just disagree in our interpretation of how able other CCers are in reading/using the Payscale info.

As I noted when I first saw the data, and then again after reviewing it more thoroughly, it is my impression that the numbers aren’t that far off from what I see in the for profit world. We can quibble to some extent about the order and the degree of differences, but I don’t think that there are many results that are grossly out of line. IMO, with a few exceptions, the “Payscale rankings” seem relatively in line with the consensus about “top” colleges.

For example, some folks like to look at these numbers and ask how are the highest achieving graduates doing. Returning to the subset of 51 colleges that are ranked in the USNWR Top 40 National Universities and the USNWR Top 20 LACs and which provide sufficient data for Payscale, following is the data for those 51 colleges with a special focus on the MID-Career Salary Level for the 75th Percentile for each college.

I’m not overly concerned with relative dollar scale, but I do think that the order reinforces the general impressions that most in the for profit world would have about these colleges. Undoubtedly, others will have a different view (although I’m dubious on whether those contrary views are rooted in reality or in prideful response to defend their favored schools) and even I see some results that surprise me (Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Emory), but that does not mean that I want to chuck the whole thing.

Rank , 75th Percentile for Mid-Career Earnings , College

1 , $ 234,000 , Dartmouth
2 , $ 198,000 , Yale
3 , $ 192,000 , U Penn
4 , $ 190,000 , Princeton
5 , $ 184,000 , Stanford
6 , $ 180,000 , Harvey Mudd
7 , $ 179,000 , Harvard
8 , $ 174,000 , U Chicago
8 , $ 174,000 , Georgetown
10 , $ 168,000 , MIT
11 , $ 167,000 , Swarthmore
11 , $ 167,000 , Colgate
13 , $ 163,000 , Notre Dame
14 , $ 162,000 , Amherst
15 , $ 161,000 , Caltech
15 , $ 161,000 , Columbia
15 , $ 161,000 , Pomona
18 , $ 160,000 , Cornell
18 , $ 160,000 , Lehigh
20 , $ 159,000 , Brown
21 , $ 150,000 , Carnegie Mellon
22 , $ 149,000 , Duke
22 , $ 149,000 , UC Berkeley
24 , $ 147,000 , Vanderbilt
25 , $ 146,000 , U Virginia
25 , $ 146,000 , Bowdoin
25 , $ 146,000 , Davidson
25 , $ 146,000 , W&L
29 , $ 144,000 , Northwestern
30 , $ 143,000 , Boston Coll
31 , $ 143,000 , Williams
32 , $ 142,000 , NYU
33 , $ 141,000 , Rice
33 , $ 141,000 , Carleton
35 , $ 140,000 , USC
36 , $ 139,000 , UCLA
37 , $ 137,000 , Georgia Tech
38 , $ 132,000 , U Illinois
39 , $ 131,000 , UCSD
40 , $ 129,000 , Middlebury
40 , $ 129,000 , Smith
42 , $ 128,000 , Emory
42 , $ 128,000 , U Michigan
42 , $ 128,000 , Oberlin
45 , $ 126,000 , Wesleyan
46 , $ 125,000 , Wellesley
47 , $ 123,000 , Vassar
47 , $ 123,000 , Hamilton
49 , $ 118,000 , U Wisconsin
50 , $ 117,000 , U North Carolina
51 , $ 116,000 , Grinnell

johnwesley · August 3, 2008, 7:50pm

hawkette - one does wonder whether you would be as defensive about this so-called study, if it did not cast Dartmouth in such a favorable light. I’m not saying Dartmouth isn’t a great school. But, it’s an idiotic survey by almost every stretch of the imagination.

dstark · August 3, 2008, 8:16pm

Hawkette, here is the thing. Nobody that really knows statistics, logic, or surveys would put any credence in payscales survey.

Nobody.

Yet, you say you hope students consider this survey.

Just blows my mind.

I guess that is the weakness of CC. Or maybe, it’s a strength. We get to see how people think.

How many people from Dartmouth and Duke replied to the survey? 8? 10? 20?

Maybe somebody else can help me out since you obviously don’t know the answers to the above questions, and you never care about context, or how important or relevant the data is anyway. As long as you can find data that fits your beliefs, it’s all good.

As I told you my school comes out very well. Are salaries all that is considered, or is unearned income considered too? ;)

By the way, Carolyn is one of the more intelligent posters who occassionally posts on CC. ;)

I really don’t care which schools she went to. Her intelligence comes through in her posts.

Pizzagirl · August 3, 2008, 8:48pm

“Undoubtedly, others will have a different view (although I’m dubious on whether those contrary views are rooted in reality or in prideful response to defend their favored schools) and even I see some results that surprise me (Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Emory), but that does not mean that I want to chuck the whole thing.”

Are you saying that you’re surprised that Northwestern isn’t near the top? Because that’s easy to explain. Journalism, theater and music. That has nothing to do with the career prospects of the rest of the school, though.

hawkette · August 3, 2008, 8:55pm

Let’s see…I’ve been accused of being a shill for Dartmouth, Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Emory…and that’s just in this thread!

And, dstark, as a frequent poster on behalf of U Michigan, I’m glad to see that you view its result on Mid-career earnings (69th) as “coming out very well.” On this, I guess we can agree. :p

Enough on the overall accuracy of the Payscale information. I think we all understand the shortcomings of the data and users will make their own decisions on its correctness and relevance.

Now if we could only get that same level of skepticism applied to other metrics that benefit your favored colleges…… :D

morrismm · August 3, 2008, 8:58pm

hawkette–you made a mistake in ranking schools from highest to lowest for 75th percentile mid-career earnings. You left out Bucknell at $156,000-- just below Brown and ahead of Carnegie Melon and Duke and way ahead of many other top ranked schools. Also remember it was top ranked LAC for starting in this study.

WSJ Article, Payscale, 100K Club - Consolidated

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