Where to Go to College If You Want a High-Paying Job | Hacker News Reader

Where to Go to College If You Want a High-Paying Job

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42 pointsprostoalex29 comments

This is Simpson's paradox at work. And the article even acknowledges it. Most of the universities on the list have disproportionate numbers of students in STEM fields.

That's why Ivy League schools aren't well represented. And also why places like CMU or University of California don't appear. Additionally, salaries aren't adjusted for cost of living. Most of the universities here are located in areas with a high cost of living, so salaries will typically be higher.

Rose-Hulman (my alma mater) is in Terre Haute Indiana is rated high, with fairly low cost of living.

The General Tso's Index is currently $4.90

Yup, Indiana is cheap as hell

But would you want to stay in Terre Haute?

Obtain a quality education.

Not really. People are highly influenced in their choice of major by their peer group. Sending yourself (or your kid) someone where your (their) friends are going to be a bunch of mechanical engineers and CS majors is actually a fairly good career move.

Absolutely, at Harvard (and other Ivy league schools) there are so many brilliant students that are going to end up with miserable salaries because they are studying art, literature, etc... and not the majors that are currently leading to the most profitable jobs/industries. Anyone reading this article would be a fool not to go to an Ivy League school if they want to study math, physics or computer science.

Or they are trust fund kids who don't realy need to work - you goto the ivys/oxbridge for the social contacts

Cost of living where the college is? Don't people move after college?

There's also some cost-of-living bias in the opposite direction. The study measures the difference between incoming and outgoing characteristics of students, so schools in low-cost areas that produce students that tend to move to high-cost areas will see a large apparent value-add. I'm pretty sure this is part of what's happening with my undergraduate school, which is pretty high on this list: it's in rural Missouri, which has a ridiculously low cost-of-living (and it takes a lot of local students), but it trains engineers that tend to move to the coasts.

Meh, this list changes every year and based on subtle ranking parameters. It was only a year or two ago that my own alma mater (Dartmouth College) ranked top on "highest mid-career salary". The whole thing has gotten rather silly.

As a Senior at Caltech: I fear that a large reason Caltech students tend to be able to make money is because you don't come to Caltech for the name, you come to it because you care about science, math, or engineering. Plenty of us were accepted to big name universities; so we've been effective at getting students who only care about name to select other schools. I worry that because of the recent positive press (like this) that that may change, and as a result Caltech's undergrad population might change to have more people who follow the money and fewer who will work hard to deserve the money.

I wouldn't sweat it. Caltech has long had a reputation as a place that works students hard. People who want money without hard work find such places anathema.

Though not without its costs. The suicide rate at Caltech is disturbing (though I say this as someone who nearly lost a loved one to that).

This might be the stereotype but I don't think it's true at Caltech these days. There hasn't been a single undergraduate suicide at Caltech in at least the last four years. Mental health resources have gotten much better (though they're certainly nowhere near perfect). We're still a much lower suicide rate than MIT, and a lower suicide rate than what my high school had.

That's good to hear. My ex-fiance was there 2008-12 and it was brutal those years. Took her years to recover.

Amongst STEM, I'd argue Caltech is a big name.

I think that's not 100% true in many culture the social pressure to get a good job will force kids into doing medicine ,law and if you cant get into that Engineering.

The number who do it for the "love" of science are a small minority.

This raises an interesting additional issue. Studying a subject that you don't like, for 4 years, because you think it will be lucrative, must be a really tough slog. I can only imagine it being possible for someone with incredible self discipline and drive.

I can also imagine that process turning out some really dull scientists and engineers.

One occasionally reads the lamentations of people who feel that they were duped into studying a subject by promises of lucrative jobs, but who struggle to establish a career after school. Here's a possible paradox: The people who make the degree seem lucrative are the ones who were not originally motivated by money.

My own situation was that I had little choice but to study science and math, because I was a terrible student, and needed the love of those subjects to supply me with the motivation I needed to get through college at all.

I chose Caltech in 2004 partly because of the status and partly because their financial aid was much better than the other 3 national colleges I got into. Off the top of my head the relative cost of education for me would have been:

- Caltech (low 5-figures)

- MIT (+50%)

- Notre Dame (+100%)

- Stanford (+150% at least)

Also, not much snow in Pasadena. Too soon? :-)

This needs scaling according to students' parents' income level. It's worthless saying students of college X all got high-income jobs if those jobs come from their parents' networks rather than the university itself.

The article doesn't explain very well, but this is exactly what the study did:

"Drawing on government and private sources, this report analyzes college “value-added,” the difference between actual alumni outcomes (like salaries) and the outcomes one would expect given a student’s characteristics and the type of institution."

It seems to me that parents' income level itself correlates with a lot of things, such as the student's interests, their academic / intellectual preparation for college, "knowing the ropes" when they get to college, and having a safety net in case they get into trouble.

I'm a junior at Carleton, #2 on the list. It's interesting to see these rankings come out since I have been under the impression that our graduates don't enter STEM fields through normal channels. Until recently, our CS department didn't have very many majors, and many of the graduates majored in liberal arts areas. These folks found their way into big tech and financial companies or ended up starting their own businesses several years after graduation.

Talking to alumni, I've always heard this is because of the ability to learn how to communicate here, but I think the difficult course load contributes a lot to character throughout 4 years here. I'd be interested to hear how this compares to other institutions.

The additional stats on the Brookings.edu page [1] were interesting as well.

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2015/04/29-beyond...

It seems that the author loves Caltech, give how the table of four-year schools is sorted. It's sorted only by mid-career earnings, and not at all by occupational earnings power (or loan repayment rate). With secondary sorting by occupational earnings power, Clarkson University and MIT would be second and third, respectively, and very close. Just sayin'.

The "X-factor" for small schools might be that they're small schools.

Small sample sizes mean higher variability. Large student populations will regress to the mean.

>Getting into Caltech is practically a winning lottery ticket for life.

Its really difficult to not get discouraged when reading these.

I'd have titled it "What to do at college if you want a high paying job"

middlling paying job if you really want to make bank you do law or target wall street/ the city not the STEM professions (outwith possibly medicine)

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