Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Which College's Graduates Make the Most Money?
Is it Harvard? Stanford? MIT? Via Economix, a website called PayScale has collected data from college grads on their jobs and salaries and put together a fascinating chart ranking the highest median graduate salaries by school. How tantalizing! And the college whose graduates earn the most money is...
Dartmouth University College*. At least, to be specific, Dartmouth graduates self-reported the highest median mid-career salary.
Before I go on, a disclaimer about the study. The pool of respondents is not randomized, but rather self-selected and the statistics are self-reported online. PayScale only included respondents whose highest degree was a bachelors, which counts out lawyers, doctors and other jobs that require a degree. As Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis, told Catherine Rampell:
"You're thinking of buying a college, if that's all you buy -- and undergraduate -without having to spend more money and time and effort to get another degree," Mr. Lee said, "you want to know what the return on that investment is."
Let's talk about what's not surprising: Engineers making bank. Check out the school types in the second graph. After Loma Linda (a Seventh-Day Adventist health services institution in southern California), you get a waterfall of engineering schools sprinkled with three Ivies.
Also unsurprising is the presence of Ivies in the first, mid-career list -- five out of the top 10 earning grads come from the Ivy League. And those numbers are obviously being depressed by the exclusion of doctors, lawyers, and academics.
Rampell serves up more graphs with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I'd just like to steal one more observation from her. Research has shown that attending one highly ranked college instead of another has, in the aggregate, very little impact over the students' future income, if you control for the ambition and work ethic of the student. As Alan B. Krueger explained in a nutshell: "'The best school that turned you down is a better predictor of your future income than the school you actually attended.''
Dartmouth University College*. At least, to be specific, Dartmouth graduates self-reported the highest median mid-career salary.
Before I go on, a disclaimer about the study. The pool of respondents is not randomized, but rather self-selected and the statistics are self-reported online. PayScale only included respondents whose highest degree was a bachelors, which counts out lawyers, doctors and other jobs that require a degree. As Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis, told Catherine Rampell:
"You're thinking of buying a college, if that's all you buy -- and undergraduate -without having to spend more money and time and effort to get another degree," Mr. Lee said, "you want to know what the return on that investment is."
Let's talk about what's not surprising: Engineers making bank. Check out the school types in the second graph. After Loma Linda (a Seventh-Day Adventist health services institution in southern California), you get a waterfall of engineering schools sprinkled with three Ivies.
Also unsurprising is the presence of Ivies in the first, mid-career list -- five out of the top 10 earning grads come from the Ivy League. And those numbers are obviously being depressed by the exclusion of doctors, lawyers, and academics.
Rampell serves up more graphs with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I'd just like to steal one more observation from her. Research has shown that attending one highly ranked college instead of another has, in the aggregate, very little impact over the students' future income, if you control for the ambition and work ethic of the student. As Alan B. Krueger explained in a nutshell: "'The best school that turned you down is a better predictor of your future income than the school you actually attended.''
Academics and administration
Dartmouth, a liberal arts institution, offers only a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree to undergraduate students. There are 39 academic departments offering 56 major programs, although students are free to design special majors or engage in dual majors. In 2008, the most popular majors were economics, government, history, psychological and brain sciences, English, biology, and engineering sciences.
In order to graduate, a student must complete 35 total courses, eight to ten of which are typically part of a chosen major program. Other requirements for graduation include the completion of ten "distributive requirements" in a variety of academic fields, proficiency in a foreign language, and completion of a writing class or first-year seminar in writing. Many departments offer honors programs requiring students seeking that distinction to engage in "independent, sustained work," culminating in the production of a thesis. In addition to the courses offered in Hanover, Dartmouth offers 57 different off-campus programs, including Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroad programs, and Exchange Programs.
Dartmouth also grants degrees in nineteen Arts & Sciences graduate programs. Furthermore, Dartmouth is home to three graduate schools: Dartmouth Medical School (established 1797), Thayer School of Engineering (1867)—which also serves as the undergraduate department of engineering sciences—and Tuck School of Business (1900). With these graduate programs, conventional American usage would accord Dartmouth the label of "Dartmouth University"; however, because of historical and nostalgic reasons (such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward), the school uses the name "Dartmouth College" to refer to the entire institution.
Dartmouth employs a total of 597 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, including the highest proportion of female tenured professors among the Ivy League universities. Faculty members have been at the forefront of such major academic developments as the Dartmouth Conferences, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, Dartmouth BASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. As of 2005, sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty research amounted to $169 million.
Dartmouth serves as the host institution of the University Press of New England, a university press founded in 1970 that is supported by a consortium of schools that also includes Brandeis University, the University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Tufts University and the University of Vermont.
In order to graduate, a student must complete 35 total courses, eight to ten of which are typically part of a chosen major program. Other requirements for graduation include the completion of ten "distributive requirements" in a variety of academic fields, proficiency in a foreign language, and completion of a writing class or first-year seminar in writing. Many departments offer honors programs requiring students seeking that distinction to engage in "independent, sustained work," culminating in the production of a thesis. In addition to the courses offered in Hanover, Dartmouth offers 57 different off-campus programs, including Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroad programs, and Exchange Programs.
Dartmouth also grants degrees in nineteen Arts & Sciences graduate programs. Furthermore, Dartmouth is home to three graduate schools: Dartmouth Medical School (established 1797), Thayer School of Engineering (1867)—which also serves as the undergraduate department of engineering sciences—and Tuck School of Business (1900). With these graduate programs, conventional American usage would accord Dartmouth the label of "Dartmouth University"; however, because of historical and nostalgic reasons (such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward), the school uses the name "Dartmouth College" to refer to the entire institution.
Dartmouth employs a total of 597 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, including the highest proportion of female tenured professors among the Ivy League universities. Faculty members have been at the forefront of such major academic developments as the Dartmouth Conferences, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, Dartmouth BASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. As of 2005, sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty research amounted to $169 million.
Dartmouth serves as the host institution of the University Press of New England, a university press founded in 1970 that is supported by a consortium of schools that also includes Brandeis University, the University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Tufts University and the University of Vermont.
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. Incorporated as "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. In addition to its undergraduate liberal arts program, Dartmouth has medical, engineering, and business schools, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences. With a total enrollment of 5,848, Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League.
Established in 1769 by Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock with funds largely raised by the efforts of Native American preacher Samson Occom, the College's initial mission was to acculturate and Christianize the Native Americans. After a long period of financial and political struggles, Dartmouth emerged from relative obscurity in the early twentieth century. In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton selected Dartmouth College as a model of institutional endurance "whose record of endurance has had implications and benefits for all American organizations, both academic and commercial," citing Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and Dartmouth's successful self-reinvention in the late 1800s. Dartmouth alumni, from Daniel Webster to the many donors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been famously involved in their college.
Dartmouth is located on a rural 269-acre (1.1 km²) campus in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire. Given the College's isolated location, participation in athletics and the school's Greek system is high. Dartmouth's 34 varsity sports teams compete in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I. Students are also well-known for preserving a variety of strong campus traditions.
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