ROI for attending 70K+ colleges & Universities
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Anonymous
| We just hired five recently CS graduates in our technology division; one from CMU, one from Northeastern, one from UCLA, one from UVA, and one from GMU. All of them were offered the same salary at 115K/year. In other words, the graduate from GMU makes the same salary as the graduate from CMU and Northeastern, and the cost to attend GMU is more than less than half of CMU and Northeastern. |
Anonymous
| And what is your question? |
Anonymous
| There is no ROI beyond parental boasting rights. Fools & their money. |
Anonymous
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The most successful people I know in terms of salary and wealth are graduates of state flagship schools.
Some who went to pricey colleges are wealthy due to inheritance and trust funds. |
Anonymous
This |
Anonymous
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GMU is a great school for getting employment after college .
OP people are ridiculous when it comes to college. We could afford any school in the country our kids are great students when they went to college we explained all the financial ramifications. They then took the reins and found schools that had great tracks to jobs in their fields of study. Our kids understand the value of a dollar and a great education. We also said they pay for anything out of state that is more expensive than the instate flagship. College is more about getting out and being successful than getting into a US News and world report ranking. |
Anonymous
| College is about more than your first job. Peer groups are important, too. Some people make life long friendships in college that turn into business partnerships, career opportunities, private investing opportunities, marriages. I'm hoping my son will go to an ivy or a nescac school and continue his team sport there. I'll love him just the same wherever he ends up, but I'm gently nudging him that direction and prepared to pay for it. |
Anonymous
| Okay, you have an anecdote featuring one GMU grad against grads from far better universities. What happened to all the other GMU grads? Probably mostly not getting $115,000. I work with a GMU grad, out for about 15 or 20 years, who makes far less than $100,000 annually. The same as a non-college grad in his same position. So... |
Anonymous
This. OP, in time, please update us on the quality of work for each. Also, let us know how careers develop for each after five years or so. |
Anonymous
| This is more common in STEM than other types of work. How many new GMU graduates are working at Goldman Sachs this year? |
Anonymous
That's a cool story but peers honestly do not help you get jobs when you are in a high powered profession with actual skills involved. If you don't have the ability and intelligence, no amount of networking is going to help you unless you are from a filthy rich family. Also, virtually no networking occurs at the undergraduate level, at least not important networking. Even in ivy league graduate professional programs, alumni networking and school loyalty play a fairly small role in ability to move up in an industry. In the top firms in most industries, there are many checks and balances concerning how subordinate evaluations are conducted. For example, at many top consulting, accounting, and finance firms you have to be evaluated by multiple superiors, and they then have to take your ratings and reviews to a central meeting among partners/directors/etc. who then benchmark across multiple offices and come to joint decisions about who gets promoted, who gets what raise, etc. The only way "networking" would in any way help you is if multiple of your powerful superiors happened to be networked in with you due to school loyalty or experience, and then put more weight on that than your actual value added. I think "networking is the reason to go to top 20 schools" is just something parents tell themselves to justify wasting a bunch of money. I say this as a professor who has both professional degrees from and has taught in the ivy league. |
Anonymous
| The college experience is more than dollars, cents and credits. I know a couple of freshman at GMU and they have come home every weekend so far. I also know a kid who was a freshman last year who did the same and transferred to VA Tech this year. It’s a completely different college experience than I’d want for my kids. |
Anonymous
| Sent my kid to public k-12, so I could send him to a private university. |
Anonymous
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OP, if you view college through a purely transactional lens, and your definition of success only involves salary, then of course someone with that mindset should not spend money on a private college.
Also, I see that you assume those private college alumni were full-pay students for all four years of college. If your college didn't teach you critical thinking skills (you know, such as to realize many kids at private schools don't pay full tuition), you might want to ask for some of your money back that your parents paid for you. |
Anonymous
This is actually a weak case. People here dis GMU, but it’s a major, prestigious research university with a great faculty. Only ignorant people would see GMU as being a significantly worse school for business-minded CS undergraduates than UVA it Northeastern. Obviously, a great GMU CS major will be at the same level, in terms of ability to code for the government or a company, as a typical CMU CS major. Another reason that this is a weak case is that you’re not giving us denominators. How many CMU alum applied, and how many did you hire? Where did the applicants from CMU rank in their class? And the same for Northeastern, UVA, etc. Especially given that GMU is a fine school in a great location, maybe the figures ARE comparable. But it’s possible that you’re getting applications from below-average CMU grads and the top GMU grads. I think a much more persuasive way you could make your point would be if you could look through your hiring spreadsheet and do some kind of analysis where you adjust for class rank and student SAT differences, AND you show results for universities that are clearly at a much lower academic level than Northeastern or UVA, such as Directional State Tech That Has Two CS Professors Who Used to be the Oboe Professors. Other issues here: - You don’t really know what applicants paid for their degrees. For many applicants from poor or broke families, the after-aid cost of schools like CMU and Northeastern may be much lower than the after-aid cost of GMU. - Even at a hard quantitative level, there are a lot of other factors that can go into analyzing value. Example: a private schools tend to do more to nurse kids toward getting degrees. It’s possible that Northeastern has better alternatives than GMU for would-be CS majors who get weeded out. And maybe it does so much more to maximize graduation rates that, once you adjust for the difference in the percentage of GMU students who flunk out entirely, the flunking-out-adjusted cost of a degree from GMU is a lot more comparable to the flunking-our-adjusted cost of a degree from Northeastern, even for full-pay students. - For some parents who have enough money not to get much aid from CMU or Northeastern, the idea of their kids blooming at a college of their choosing might have a high value. Personally, I’m a donut hole person myself, not rich, but my main reason for sending my son to college is that he’s a wonderful, bright, serious, hard-working kid who likes hanging out with other bright, serious kids, and it seems as if he could have a great time in college. I just want him to learn something and have good clean fun. We aren’t going into debt to send him away, but, if he’d gotten into CMU, and all that stood between him and CMU was a need for some loans, I would have taken out some loans. - Times change. Right now, demand for CS majors is high. But shifts in the economy could change that. If demand for CS majors cools, the perceived quality of the alma mater could matter more. - If AI eliminates a lot of coding jobs, that could improve the relative standing of grads from more sophisticated programs that give students a better background in the theoretical aspects of CS. My guess is that, in general, the more prestigious CS programs tend to teach more theory. - Even now, CS people face a lot of age discrimination. In the long run, even under current conditions, it seems possible that CS grads from flexible, possibly more prestigious schools that encourage them to take a wide range of solid courses might be better equipped to change careers than CS students who mostly just learned to code. |