The NYT Economix blog has a write-up on PayScale, a college ranking company that measures how much college graduates make by institution, both at mid-career and at initial entry into the market. It is limited to bachelor's degrees, i.e., it specifically excludes those who go on to earn graduate degrees.
This seems to me obviously wrong. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people from Emory who now have (or are on the way to having) JDs, MDs, MPHs, and PhDs. Absent some pretty compelling statistical evidence to the contrary, I will remain convinced that this is largely a function of peer culture, which varies by school. In fact, not only is the likelihood of going to grad school influenced by which college you go to, but so is the quality of that eventual graduate program (this effect is probably more muted but, e.g., all other things being equal, a top law school will admit someone who went to Brown over someone who went to the University of North Dakota).
PayScale also accounts for variation by college major, which is reasonable enough. But the theory on omitting further study -- it will skew the data -- also seems to demand accounting for career field and alma mater interaction: do teachers who went to Cal make more money than teachers who went to Reed? Accountants? Etc. Of course, if you're willing to complicate the data like that, you might as well bring back in all those lawyers and physicians and scientists. If the quality of the graduate program matters, find some way to account for that, but ignoring altogether the students who don't stop at a BA/BS, when your objective is to measure how much money a college degree is going to be worth from a given school, is foolish -- and the outcome is some pretty meaningless rankings.
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