11/18/2019
Georgetown has been doing interesting studies lately of colleges, such as their one from last summer that if the 200 most prestigious colleges just drafted high school students in order of test scores, top colleges would whiter and maler.
And here’s a new one from Georgetown rather like Raj Chetty’s that I wrote up in Taki’s in 2017.
Here’s Georgetown’s rankings of top 50 undergrad colleges in terms of median earnings after ten years:
| Institution | State | Institution type | Median 10-yr earnings | Net price | Graduation rate | |
| 1 | Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences | NY | Private nonprofit | $124,700 | $29,761 | 74% |
| 2 | St Louis College of Pharmacy | MO | Private nonprofit | $124,100 | $30,274 | 72% |
| 3 | Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences | MA | Private nonprofit | $116,000 | $37,779 | 76% |
| 4 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MA | Private nonprofit | $104,700 | $20,771 | 93% |
| 5 | Babson College | MA | Private nonprofit | $96,100 | $35,540 | 91% |
| 6 | Maine Maritime Academy | ME | Public | $95,600 | $23,460 | 66% |
| 7 | Stanford University | CA | Private nonprofit | $94,000 | $13,261 | 94% |
| 8 | Georgetown University | DC | Private nonprofit | $93,500 | $30,107 | 94% |
| 9 | University of the Sciences | PA | Private nonprofit | $91,600 | $31,454 | 71% |
| 10 | Harvard University | MA | Private nonprofit | $89,700 | $14,327 | 97% |
| 11 | Stevens Institute of Technology | NJ | Private nonprofit | $89,200 | $36,620 | 83% |
| 12 | Harvey Mudd College | CA | Private nonprofit | $88,800 | $34,464 | 95% |
| 13 | United States Merchant Marine Academy | NY | Public | $88,100 | $6,758 | 78% |
| 14 | Bentley University | MA | Private nonprofit | $86,900 | $35,671 | 90% |
| 15 | Massachusetts Maritime Academy | MA | Public | $86,600 | $18,027 | 75% |
| 16 | California Institute of Technology | CA | Private nonprofit | $85,900 | $24,245 | 91% |
| 17 | University of Pennsylvania | PA | Private nonprofit | $85,900 | $24,242 | 95% |
| 18 | Colorado School of Mines | CO | Public | $84,900 | $25,710 | 77% |
| 19 | Worcester Polytechnic Institute | MA | Private nonprofit | $84,900 | $40,376 | 87% |
| 20 | Duke University | NC | Private nonprofit | $84,400 | $35,737 | 95% |
| 21 | Carnegie Mellon University | PA | Private nonprofit | $83,600 | $31,102 | 89% |
| 22 | Columbia University in the City of New York | NY | Private nonprofit | $83,300 | $24,231 | 95% |
| 23 | Yale University | CT | Private nonprofit | $83,200 | $18,627 | 98% |
| 24 | California State University Maritime Academy | CA | Public | $82,900 | $16,416 | 63% |
| 25 | SUNY Maritime College | NY | Public | $82,800 | $18,413 | 60% |
| 26 | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | NY | Private nonprofit | $82,000 | $34,839 | 83% |
| 27 | Lehigh University | PA | Private nonprofit | $81,900 | $34,212 | 87% |
| 28 | Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology | IN | Private nonprofit | $80,900 | $36,906 | 82% |
| 29 | Kettering University | MI | Private nonprofit | $80,500 | $37,247 | 57% |
| 30 | DigiPen Institute of Technology | WA | Private for-profit | $80,200 | $35,538 | 41% |
| 31 | Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus | GA | Public | $79,100 | $13,291 | 86% |
| 32 | University of Notre Dame | IN | Private nonprofit | $78,400 | $28,768 | 95% |
| 33 | Villanova University | PA | Private nonprofit | $77,900 | $41,858 | 90% |
| 34 | Cornell University | NY | Private nonprofit | $77,200 | $31,230 | 94% |
| 35 | Washington and Lee University | VA | Private nonprofit | $76,100 | $24,761 | 92% |
| 36 | Tufts University | MA | Private nonprofit | $75,800 | $32,620 | 93% |
| 37 | Dartmouth College | NH | Private nonprofit | $75,500 | $30,421 | 96% |
| 38 | Princeton University | NJ | Private nonprofit | $74,700 | $9,327 | 97% |
| 39 | Case Western Reserve University | OH | Private nonprofit | $74,600 | $35,316 | 82% |
| 40 | University of Southern California | CA | Private nonprofit | $74,000 | $30,232 | 92% |
| 41 | Johns Hopkins University | MD | Private nonprofit | $73,200 | $33,586 | 93% |
| 42 | Claremont McKenna College | CA | Private nonprofit | $72,900 | $26,933 | 91% |
| 43 | Santa Clara University | CA | Private nonprofit | $72,600 | $33,738 | 89% |
| 44 | Boston College | MA | Private nonprofit | $72,500 | $34,550 | 92% |
| 45 | Fairfield University | CT | Private nonprofit | $72,100 | $36,929 | 82% |
| 46 | Clarkson University | NY | Private nonprofit | $72,000 | $30,563 | 72% |
| 47 | University of the Pacific | CA | Private nonprofit | $71,700 | $29,171 | 69% |
| 48 | Milwaukee School of Engineering | WI | Private nonprofit | $71,300 | $21,328 | 65% |
| 49 | Missouri University of Science and Technology | MO | Public | $71,200 | $14,473 | 64% |
| 50 | College of the Holy Cross | MA | Private nonprofit | $71,000 | $34,159 | 92% |
As I mentioned in my Chetty write-up, the top-ranked pharmacy schools have 6-year programs, so this might not be a fair comparison. The #1 normal 4 year college is MIT, which isn’t terribly surprising. Babson, a business-oriented college in suburban Boston ranks quite high.
Masculine high end trade schools like Maine Maritime Academy and Colorado School of Mines also do well.
Also, colleges that only offer STEM majors do better than ones that offer a mix of STEM and liberal arts majors. For example, graduates of the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia get paid more on average than graduates of its affiliate University of the Arts. If you combined them, the merged institution would be more average.
Some of these figures have to do with cost of living of where grads tend to wind up: e.g., Boston is an expensive place, so graduates of Boston colleges tend to be paid a lot so they can afford to buy a Boston-area home.
The Net Price column is interesting: Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard are listed as being exceptionally cheap. Because of their huge endowments, they offer generous financial aid (i.e., tuition discounts), but I hadn’t realized how nice it is financially to go to an HYPS school.
There is only one for-profit college in the top 50: DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA for computer game designers.
It’s interesting how capitalism doesn’t work very well for higher education. My impression is that not-for-profits like Yale and U. of Michigan tend to be more exclusive at keeping out the riff-raff, while for-profit colleges can seldom resist letting in more warm bodies.
For example, in Los Angeles there are a million nightschools teaching screenwriting. But if you can, you definitely want to get into the programs of one of the prestigious not-for-profits like USC because the average quality of the students is so much higher. A big part of taking these courses is getting feedback from other students, and the jokes and plot pitches your classmates suggest for your script are better at USC than at many for-profit courses because USC turns away lots of people who have the money, but the business-based courses reject fewer applicants.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.