## 2013-08-30

### US College Rankings by Graduating Earnings Achieved

Whee... just figured out how to approach the damn "how much do rankings matter" question at future USAPPS workshops :P I'm just going to present salary data from PayScale.

No more arguments *sic* on whether a brand is 10x better or 100x better. If you're in the x-percentile, given the data that we have, the brand is exactly 2.7562565x better, that is all. If you're median, you're a moron, fuck you, quit worrying about it. *also sic*

Sigh. :)

(THIS IS NOT ADVICE. This is just a reminder to myself to drag up the relevant data before delivering actual advice in the future. I'm thinking aloud, intuitively about some numbers. Help me out here, those of you who are/were in US colleges...)
Re-explaining US college rankings, in terms of nominal annual salary achieved by graduates, in the year following senior year (if both schools and students are ordered by such):
the 99th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school may make 2-3 times more than the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school;

but the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school may make more than the 75th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school

Lots more data would be nice to have. Above is based only my limited data/experience + intuition about this. My gross assumption is, 2005: Bates 99th-percentile $60k, vs Harvard 99th-percentile$120-180k; Harvard 75th-percentile \$ 59.999k.

:P

Seriously, I should go do a degree in this or something - if only I cared much about degrees.
(Of interest: PayScale.com's 2013 top-ten private colleges by 'salary potential'.

So this is enough data to get the point across... but finer data would be nice. It's worth someone's BS or MS thesis to go find the whole dataset.

Main thought I had in mind was the the top 1% at a top 3% school probably make more than the bottom 74% at a top 0.3% school, so that got me started.)