Revealed Employer Preferences in T50(ish) Colleges, 名单见内

来源: 成功的洋葱于 2024-09-30 07:03:49 [档案] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 阅读数 : (19900 bytes)

Revealed Employer Preferences in T50(ish) Colleges : r/ApplyingToCollege (reddit.com)

I have a love-hate relationship with rankings. I think they're fascinating due to the effect they have public perceptions of college prestige but also completely worthless in determining anything about actual program quality. But they sort of self-legitimize themselves by skewing employer and grad school preferences of undergraduate colleges, thus creating a self-fufilling prophecy. That being said after diving down a rabbit hole of post-graduation employment outcomes and the unreliability of datasets for comparative use, I decided to use the last few hours to slap-dash an analysis of "degree premiums" at a set of competitive colleges to see where has the best brand bang-for-buck.

Datasets Used

US Department of Education College Scorecard Dataset 2019-2020
Niche (Reference Point)

Methodology

I started off with a set of schools given an A+ ranking in Academics on Niche. This is a bit subjective but I feel the 49 research universities and 29 liberal arts colleges from this group decently represent commonly agreed upon prestigious and semi-prestigious schools. From there I isolated the reported 2021 post-graduation income using the DoE Scorecard for each school, by major - then comparing that income with the national average income for the major. For transformation in to a neat excel file I indexed and ranked these schools by a premium that was taken from the averaged difference between all majors and the national averages by college. There are some holes (primarily small reference points for many programs and heterogeneous distribution of majors who themselves have heteroskedastic income variances) but this is just a rough product being posted at 3:20 AM when I have like 3 quizzes tmr so too bad! its good enough for a mid-low effortpost.

I've divided these colleges in to five groups:

Very-High Premium Schools (+$30,000 Starting Salary Premium)

Harvey Mudd
CalTech
MIT
UPenn
Stanford
Harvard

While it's interesting only 3 of the 5 HYPSM schools made it on here, given the intense connections to Wall Street and Silicon Valley at these schools and relatively weaker grad school prep culture than say - Princeton, the degree premium is a bit less surprising considering the likelihood these schools have stronger network effects in the private sector than their peers.

High Premium Schools (+$15,000 Starting Salary Premium)

Dartmouth
Duke
Johns Hopkins
CMU
Yale
Claremont McKenna
Georgetown
UChicago
Columbia
Northwestern
Vanderbilt
Princeton
Rice
Cornell
UC Berkeley
NYU

Much of the T20 here so no real surprises. NYU's strengths in its business and journalism department + wage inflation for high numbers of graduates residing in New York may inflate it's graduation premium.

Moderate Premium Schools (+$10,000 Starting Salary Premium)

Washington & Lee
Bowdoin
Georgia Tech
Northeastern
Notre Dame
BC
Pomona
Amherst
Villanova
USC
Emory
Williams
Swarthmore
Barnard
Colgate
Wake Forest
Middlebury
BU
UVA
Tufts
WashU St. Louis
Wellesley

Elite LAC's and big private research universities that either lower end T20's that lack "breakout" programs or are part of Boston's "magnificent seven". Also a few top public colleges. This zone seems to represent the premium placed on research university degrees compared to equivalent liberal arts schools as well as either top schools with poor career services or just-below-top schools significant institutional clout.

Low Premium Schools (+$0 Starting Salary Premium)

Trinity (Texas)
Bucknell
Wesleyan
Brandeis
Lehigh
UMichigan
UT Austin
Colby
Brown
UCLA
Davidson
URochester
UW Madison
Haverford
Case Western
Bates
UNC Chapel Hill
Bryn Mawr
UIUC
UC San Diego
Hamilton
URichmond
UMiami
UFlorida
William & Mary
Kenyon
UGeorgia
Vassar

Public Colleges and Liberal Arts Colleges continue to get depressed premiums on the market compared to their private school peers. The only major outlier is Brown, which may be due to a mix of student culture and more interest in liberal arts style education.

Disutility Colleges (Less than $0 Starting Salary Premium)