Reply to Earning Difference Among Niche A+ Ranked Schools

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[quote=Anonymous]There are some issues with College Scorecard. For starters, as noted by others, it doesn't take cost of living into account. College alumni tend to be more concentrated around the college itself, both in terms of state and region. Second, College Scorecard is sparsely populated. The number of students indicated is not the number of salary data points but the number of students graduating with a particular major. Third, College Scorecard only gets data on those taking federal loans. This may not be a representative group, depending on the college and your own student. Fourth, the site gathers data for students only four years after college. Colleges which send a higher proportion into grad school or into nonprofit services shortly after graduation could be more penalized, especially if those tend to be the higher performing students. There is also an argument that some schools teach skills that take longer to manifest in terms of salary, ie, developing unrelated skills (ie writing may not be important for an entry level tech worker, but it can become important as they try to break into management later on), how to learn brand new things (ie colleges with broader distribution requirements might teach how to confront one's own learning weaknesses in different academic contexts), or how to be a leader in a community (which could be influenced by the breadth of campus opportunities typically experienced by an undergraduate.)

I have always found PayScale more useful. It doesn't account for cost of living differences either, but it provides data over a broader economic group and career stages (anyone who contributes data) and is transparent about the number of data points.

As an example, if I go to the latest version (posted last week I believe) of PayScale's College Salary Report for four year colleges and select "All Alumni" and look at the list sorted by "Mid Career Pay," I see Santa Clara at 16th (omitted from OP's list of "top schools.") I think it's is a good school but one that benefits greatly from its central location in Silicon Valley, so I am more likely to compare it to, say, Stanford, which is 2nd. If I look at a college like Carleton in Minnesota, it's ranked 67th.  I'm more inclined to compare it to the top schools in the Midwest, like UChicago, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt. Carleton is in line with those (actually higher), even though the list quoted by OP has Carleton as a "disutility college" and the others as "high premium." This is all the more interesting given two of them offer engineering and Carleton doesn't. In fact, Carleton just edges NYU, which surprised me given that NYU not only offers engineering but is in the most expensive city and many grads work there after, so has a cost of living benefit. When looking through the info for Carleton on College Scorecard, most majors have no salary data at all, and the ones that do have an unknown number of source salary points.

The bottom line is College Scorecard is a good idea but has too little useful data to be of value with this kind of comparison.

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/all-bachelors

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