Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data

Its hard to take the conclusions of such an article seriously, especially with regards to the gender pay gaps, when they aren't normalized for degree program. Unless you are comparing Engineering women versus Engineering men, or College of Eng. in school A versus CoE in school B, it is utterly impossible to meaningfully compare schools A and B as well.

The data is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;</a>, which was posted as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10211838" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10211838</a>. We merged that thread into this one since they are the same story from two angles.<p>It&#x27;s rather arbitrary which thread of the two to pick as primary. Arguably it should be the original source, but then the article gives more background, and people have linked to the original source in the thread. We can change it if people feel strongly about it.

I think you must take these concepts into account if you&#x27;re going to think about how to &quot;fix&quot; or &quot;disrupt&quot; education.<p>1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.<p>2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.<p>3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.<p>4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.<p>5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) &quot;top 100&quot; universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and&#x2F;or trade schools under the same umbrella of &quot;education&quot; and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.

I think the worth of a college education varies so much from person to person, as well as field to field. If you are becoming a doctor, going to college is 100% necessary for obvious reasons. But for a programmer, it may not be, depending on the person.<p>More than helping you learn how to code, a college education helps you learn HOW to learn how to to code. You won&#x27;t get much useful experience until you are in an internship or doing actual work in the field learning from people that are better than you. You can spend forever on theories, but it will never actually get you anywhere unless you put it to use. For the people that need to learn how to learn, the price of college can be worth it. For others, it can be a waste of time and a LOT of money.

Carnegie Mellon has salary information for each major. For example, computer science majors: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmu.edu&#x2F;career&#x2F;salaries-and-destinations&#x2F;2015-survey&#x2F;scs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmu.edu&#x2F;career&#x2F;salaries-and-destinations&#x2F;2015-sur...</a> have a mean starting salary of $103,608 and median of $105,000. This doesn&#x27;t include any stock, stock options or bonuses yet. Out of 192 students, 32 joined Google, 19 joined Facebook and 12 joined Microsoft.<p>The data for MIT is very similar (even same median starting salary of $105,000 for EECS): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gecd.mit.edu&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;about&#x2F;files&#x2F;2014-gss-survey.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gecd.mit.edu&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;about&#x2F;files&#x2F;2014-gs...</a><p>So if you can just graduate in the top half of your class in at a good CS school you start with a 6 figure salary.

Important notes regarding earnings from the dataset documentation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;FullDataDocumentation.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;assets&#x2F;FullDataDocumentation...</a>):<p>&gt; <i>There are two notable limitations that researchers should keep in mind for all of these metrics. First, the data are not yet available to produce program-level earnings data. Research suggests that the variation across programs within a school may be even greater than aggregate earnings across schools; for instance, STEM and health majors frequently earn more than students who study in other fields. Second, the data include only Title IV-receiving students, so figures may not be representative of schools with a low proportion of Title IV-eligible students. Additionally, the data are restricted to students who are not enrolled (enrolled means having an in-school deferment status for at least 30 days of the measurement year), so students who are currently enrolled in graduate school at the time of measurement are excluded.</i><p>Although, looking at the data, the real problem is that half the colleges have PrivacySurpressed values for those fields.

I really do wonder how much of these gaps can be attributed to the universities themselves. Elite universities are more likely to attract successful and motivated and thus will &quot;produce&quot; more successful graduates than other universities. No name state colleges are more likely to attract the less successful high school students and thus they will likely produce less successful graduates. I bet there is nearly as much correlation between SAT scores and pay as the eliteness of the attended university and pay.

&gt; At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year.<p>Bennington always impressed me as as rich kids&#x27; school. I have to wonder how many of these former students are living off of trust funds.

This is really exciting, and I think this shows that the government is starting to &#x27;get&#x27; software development after the healthcare.gov fiasco.<p>They released the data under an open source license and have the source of the website on github! It&#x27;s built w&#x2F; Jekyll!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;18F&#x2F;college-choice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;18F&#x2F;college-choice</a><p>If you asked me a year ago how likely I thought this was, I would have guessed something like 1%.

I feel like a tremendous factor behind the numbers for middle-tier schools is simple geography. For example, I make more than double what many of my college friends who I consider at least equally as smart and motivated as I make, and it&#x27;s pretty clear that the only reason is I chose to move to California whereas they stayed in Nevada.<p>Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student&#x27;s job into account in some way.

wow! -- the 10 year earnings for 2 yr college &quot;Los Angeles County College of Nursing and Allied Health&quot; is almost as high as harvard.<p>see: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ed.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;colleges-where-students-earn-high-salaries&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ed.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;colleges-where-students-earn-...</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ed.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;schools-with-low-costs-and-high-incomes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ed.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;schools-with-low-costs-and-hi...</a>

Anyone else find that 5 page slider of text just awful. I can only ask but WHY?<p>Do people who make websites nowadays hate people and want to see the world(wide web) burn?

Interesting article. I graduated from (and interned) at UCLA while the need-based financial aid initiative was rolling out[1]. Obviously, it&#x27;s the primary factor in minimizing student debt (it&#x27;s obvious to see that students with well-to-do families have more financial support than poor ones).<p>An issue I take is conflating public institutions with private ones. I remember UCLA &amp; Berkeley admissions people always struggling to poach students that might attend Stanford&#x2F;Caltech, but the issue is very complex. Huge endowments are just part of the story.<p>It makes sense that a wealthy private school (Harvard&#x2F;Princeton&#x2F;etc.) has more extra-academic connections that help students get better jobs. Smaller class sizes also make a difference. I just think the article tries to talk about too many things and doesn&#x27;t end up doing any of them justice. The gender stuff shoehorned at the end is a prime example.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ucla.edu&#x2F;admission&#x2F;affordability" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ucla.edu&#x2F;admission&#x2F;affordability</a>

&gt; &quot;students at private for-profit two-year and four-year institutions have high rates of borrowing and their graduates often have large amounts of debt.&quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t that expected? Students who go to for-profit schools by definition have to pay their way through so it would make sense they have higher levels of borrowing and debt.

Are people finally starting to ask where the DoE got its earnings numbers to increase student loan tuition caps, the resulting tuition hikes across the board, explosion in the private education market, and the zero risk (except to the tax payers) student loan interest income keg party?

How is grad school factored in? At my school, a very large portion (~40%) of students go on to masters&#x2F;PhD&#x2F;law&#x2F;MD right after graduation. This could deflate salary numbers compared to what those students make when they actually enter the workforce.

The data is not particularly uniform, with NULLs and PrivacySurpressed values everywhere.<p>I wanted to play around with SAT&#x2F;ACT data and create correlations with other variables...but the only values reported are 25% quantile and 75% quantile for accepted students (they derive a midpoint between the two...by averaging them, which is wrong). Hmrph.

I love that to support their headline, the article states that at hundreds of colleges many students aren&#x27;t earning more than high school graduates 10 years after graduation. Then in the next sentence says that those hundreds of &quot;colleges&quot; include barber academies, cosmetology schools, and for-profit colleges.

We believe that we should cram as many people in the country as possible through our current conception of a university.<p>There are several reasons people want to believe that&#x27;s a good idea:<p>* They believe that someone with a B.A., B.S., etc. is a higher class person than one without<p>* They believe that putting everyone through the system will bring everyone up to that higher class, thus removing the negative effects of classes in society<p>* They believe that it&#x27;s the only path to education<p>* They believe it&#x27;s somehow immune from various biases, corruption, infighting, trend-following, etc.<p>* They believe it&#x27;s a diverse forum for the free exchange of ideas, and that all reasonable ideas are given their due consideration<p>* They believe that &quot;good colleges&quot; are good and lead to success because of the quality of the education and the insight of the professors<p>Unfortunately, none of those are true. Until we admit that, we can&#x27;t fix the problem.<p>When we do admit those things, we can acknowledge that:<p>* A person who reads a lot of books and participates in discussions with others who have different opinions has as much claim on &quot;good citizenship&quot; as anyone else (college or not), and it doesn&#x27;t take tens of thousands of dollars<p>* Language, history, and art classes can be quite effective by teaching language, history, and art; and not spending the entire time on politics<p>* Vocational schools are probably the right place for a lot of things, including programming and software engineering (though a university might be the right place for Comp. Sci.). When we figure out software engineering, perhaps it belongs in the university, but for now it&#x27;s not an established discipline.<p>* If we really want people to get a more academic education, giving them a loan and demanding them to pay it back regardless of bankruptcy makes little sense. Maybe that makes sense for vocational school, where it&#x27;s more of a straight investment. But for a purely academic education, it&#x27;s probably a lot cheaper to provide it anyway, so lots of financial approaches could work.<p>* &quot;Good colleges&quot; are good because of the kind and quality of <i>students</i> that they concentrate in one place -- in other words, a social club built around an academic theme. (This is really the one that makes it obvious that bringing more people into the university system won&#x27;t have the same results as the ones who are in it now.)

College isn&#x27;t the only method to become educated. Going in debt for on College lark is a social acceptable way to spend money, but it isn&#x27;t the only way to win. If you know what you want to do chase then chase all methods to get trained. Otherwise spend some time traveling the world to figure your life and then consider spending $200K ~ $400K on college education. Don&#x27;t waster your time on these for profit degree mills. Their product sucks and no employer cares you got a purchased a degree from Phoenix College

&quot;Mrs. degree&quot; assortative mating (+ field of study preferences) make the &#x27;females in college X&#x27; implication muddier, but overall it&#x27;s good to encourage people to look at expected outcomes before opting into $100k debt.<p>That is, a rational woman would look at expected earnings including child support + alimony, and insist on figures stratified by field of study (so she can choose where + what to study).

This assumes college is what determines salary after college... Sure it might have some effect but I bet other factors are also v important e.g. Parent&#x27;s income, family wealth, social network, personality, life goals, etc.<p>Also perpetuates the myth that college is for job training. It&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s for education.

Given the point about program : tuition I wonder if different majors should be asked different tuitions. Bio&#x2F;cs&#x2F;things that cost more and have more earning potential could charge a higher price than the English lit majors.

Has there been any sort of Marxist analysis about the middle class using the higher education system to entrench their advantage over the poor and therefore willingly going along with ridiculous tuition fees?

Is there a data source link? Can&#x27;t find it anywhere and I&#x27;m just jumping from article to article when it highlights their data source -_-

I think this industry is bound for massive disruption. It&#x27;s one of the social pillars so . . . what happens when one of those gets moved?

This wouldn&#x27;t be a concern of the Federal Government at all if they&#x27;d just stop funding student loans. And there would be a side-benefit of college costs dropping sharply. A win-win for everyone!

Beyond questionable gaps, like gender gaps, it&#x27;s blatant we&#x27;re living under a modern caste system.

University is a scam.<p>I feel so bitter. I just graduated 1 month ago. I could have continued with my masters by I am done. I hated every second of being in university.<p>Not because of any other reason but because of how bleak my financial prospect was. I consider myself lucky that my parents bankrolled me - but looking at the aggregate amount I spent on it - 60,000 pounds.<p>I paid 60,000 pounds literally to read a bunch of books and write some code that could run on a computer from the 1980s, which I could have done on my own from my parent&#x27;s basement.<p>Every-time a lecturer gave a low-effort lecture I felt like punching them in the face, I could feel the the negative acceleration of my net worth everyday I woke up from sleep. How was I to recover it ? Is it even possible ?<p>Meanwhile there is so much opportunities, so much data to explore, so much work to done. Its a crime that so many young minds are made to waste their time on meaningless stuff while they would start with small apprenticeship and allowed to grow.