Revealed-- Employer Preferences of The Top Colleges
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Log In Expand search Revealed Employer Preferences in T50(ish) Colleges Datasets Used US Department of Education College Scorecard Dataset 2019-2020 Niche (Reference Point) Methodology A set of schools given an A+ ranking in Academics on Niche. This is a bit subjective but the 49 research universities and 29 liberal arts colleges. From reported 2021 post-graduation income using the DoE Scorecard for each school, by major - then comparing that income with the national average income for the major. Each was indexed and ranked by a premium taken from the averaged difference between all majors and the national averages by college. Divided colleges in to five groups: Very-High Premium Schools (+$30,000 Starting Salary Premium) Harvey Mudd CalTech MIT UPenn Stanford Harvard While it's interesting only 3 of the 5 HYPSM schools made it on here, given the intense connections to Wall Street and Silicon Valley at these schools and relatively weaker grad school prep culture than say - Princeton, the degree premium is a bit less surprising considering the likelihood these schools have stronger network effects in the private sector than their peers. High Premium Schools (+$15,000 Starting Salary Premium) Dartmouth Duke Johns Hopkins CMU Yale Claremont McKenna Georgetown UChicago Columbia Northwestern Vanderbilt Princeton Rice Cornell UC Berkeley NYU Much of the T20 here so no real surprises. NYU's strengths in its business and journalism department + wage inflation for high numbers of graduates residing in New York may inflate it's graduation premium. Moderate Premium Schools (+$10,000 Starting Salary Premium) Washington & Lee Bowdoin Georgia Tech Northeastern Notre Dame BC Pomona Amherst Villanova USC Emory Williams Swarthmore Barnard Colgate Wake Forest Middlebury BU UVA Tufts WashU St. Louis Wellesley Elite LAC's and big private research universities that either lower end T20's that lack "breakout" programs or are part of Boston's "magnificent seven". Also a few top public colleges. This zone seems to represent the premium placed on research university degrees compared to equivalent liberal arts schools as well as either top schools with poor career services or just-below-top schools significant institutional clout. Low Premium Schools (+$0 Starting Salary Premium) Trinity (Texas) Bucknell Wesleyan Brandeis Lehigh UMichigan UT Austin Colby Brown UCLA Davidson URochester UW Madison Haverford Case Western Bates UNC Chapel Hill Bryn Mawr UIUC UC San Diego Hamilton URichmond UMiami UFlorida William & Mary Kenyon UGeorgia Vassar Public Colleges and Liberal Arts Colleges continue to get depressed premiums on the market compared to their private school peers. The only major outlier is Brown, which may be due to a mix of student culture and more interest in liberal arts style education. Disutility Colleges (Less than $0 Starting Salary Premium) Tulane Macalester Carleton Grinnell Smith Colorado |
Anonymous
| So odd. I thought employers said they were taking Harvard off their list after the protests! |
Anonymous
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Looks about right. Thanks.
--MIT grad |
Anonymous
| Mid-career numbers for MIT pretty lackluster compared to Harvard and Penn or Stanford. or Yale or Princeton. I wonder why? |
Anonymous
Is there a link to this? I don't see a single college I wouldn't expect in any category except Tulane. Would think Tulane would be right there with Wake. |
Anonymous
| I have an impression that these statistics are based on base salaries only, not TC. So I wouldn’t derive too much from these. |
Anonymous
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I thought Barnard was Columbia? People here fight tooth and nail and say they are the same.
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Anonymous
| Mine is at a school in the top list and my 2024 graduated from one in the second group—seems correct . Top schools payoff, in more ways than captured in this rubric. People who try to sat they are not worth it have never been to one and had a current student at one |
Anonymous
| Interesting list. Harvard no matter the ranking service always comes out on top. |
Anonymous
Lol NO. Not considered the same at all by those who know and do the hiring |
Anonymous
| Barnard not the same as Columbia. |
Anonymous
a higher percent goes to PhD/academia |
Anonymous
| Brown grad with a humanities degree here. My starting salary wasn’t high (though was totally fine), but I had multiple offers and a job waiting for me at graduation. I now make $750k in an arts job that at least isn’t actively making the world worse that I didn’t have to go to grad school for. Starting salary isn’t everything. |
Anonymous
Nope. It’s that engineering is a solid but not great paying career. |
Anonymous
| The $30K and $15K aren't really that far apart. They just collapsed the data into fewer buckets |