<p>^^^ I wonder how many of the 54% of Berkeley grads who leave the Bay Area end up in LA, where many of them came from?</p>
<p>As for where Duke grads end up, I have no idea. It once was a distinctly Southern school, but it’s increasingly a Northeastern school in the middle of a growing metropolitan region, the Research Triangle, that in some ways can be seen as the southernmost extension of the Northeast (apart from south Florida, I guess). But my guess would be that considerably more than 15% of Duke grads stay in NC. It’s a fast-growing region with lots of high-end, information-economy job opportunities, and many Duke grads seem to like it there.</p>
<p>Duke’s students come from a wide variety of states:</p>
<p>15% North Carolina
10% Florida
8% New York
7% Texas
6% California
5% Virginia
5% Maryland
4% New Jersey
4% Illinois
3% Connecticut
3% Massachusetts
3% Georgia
3% Ohio
3% Pennsylvania</p>
<p>Given this distribution, I’d be very surprised to learn that large numbers stay in the Research Triangle or even in NC. More likely, there are as many who go to NYC as stay in North Carolina. As for the pay of Duke graduates vs UC Berkeley, I’d guess that, after averaging for cost of living, the Duke grads would earn at a higher average rate. However, I would guess that the top 25% of each would be fairly similar to one another.</p>
<p>“Maybe, but it shows how meaningless it is for your future to choose the #8 ranked school over the #14 ranked school (this year, no less) in comparison to other differentiating factors between the two.”</p>
<p>Another explanation to Duke’s lower median salary would be in the methods used by WSG.</p>
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<p>Duke is very much a pre-professional focused university. A very significant amount of graduates are thus not included in the survey data, including all the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and women who are probably making quite a lot today. Because of this, the median salary is not a very great prediction for the success of Duke grads, as most of them go in to one of the fields excluded in the calculations.</p>
<p>I would think looking at the top 10% of each school’s grads may be less relevant than examining the median. </p>
<p>I think they should have looked at all alums of the colleges surveyed as opposed to just those with no advanced degree. It would allow for a much larger sample size and it’s not like you can’t claim that UG still has an effect on one’s career even if you do obtain a graduate degree. It would be interesting for comparison purposes, if nothing else.</p>