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So you picked a small state school for undergrad, thinking that if you made good grades you’d get a doctorate at an Ivy league to make up for it? Well, science says you screwed up. New data released from a study at Vanderbilt University shows that the prestige of your undergraduate institution is what will affect your earnings, not where you attended grad school.
This study looked at postgrads, and showed that, students that graduated from a non-prestigious undergraduate institution but got a grad degree at an elite school made less than those that got their undergraduate education at an elite university. Even worse, their salaries are unlikely to ever match up. Dr. Joni Hersch from Vanderbilt says:
“Status of the graduate degree-granting institution should have a more important relation to earnings than status of the undergraduate institution, but even high ability students who attend nonselective institutions for their bachelor’s degrees are, on average, unable to overcome their initial placement by moving up to an elite graduate or professional school for an advanced degree.”
So essentially, we completely get how messed up this is, but it’s highly unlikely that it changes anytime soon. Awesome.
To get this info, Hersch used data from the 2003 and 2010 National Survey of College Graduates, which looks at around 178,000 postgrads across the nation. Hersch sorted undergraduate schools into four tiers of prestige (with Tier 1 being the best and Tier 4 being the worst), and was able to consolidate her data into the following graph. The male-female earning gap aside, postgrads who attended a Tier 1 school for their undergraduate education earned 39-44% more than those who got a bachelor’s degree from a non-elite school, regardless of where they got a graduate degree.
Well, fuck. The good news is that Hersch’s data also showed that those without an Ivy-league bachelor’s degree were less likely to attend a graduate school, which also factored into the data. So if you can work your ass off to get into a great graduate school and increase that earning potential to match that girl’s whose Daddy bought a new library to get her into Yale. Well, almost.
[via Vanderbilt University]
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Steph W.
Steph W. is a new Master's degree graduate with an intern's salary and six-figure taste. She realizes her expectations far exceed reality, so she spends her days pinning away Loubs she pretends are in her physical closet instead of her virtual one. Her hobbies include attempting to trapping her boyfriend into marriage before he finds out how insane she is and pretending that Black Box wine tastes as good as the kind she could afford when she was gainfully employed. Send her tips for getting out of student debt at recruitchairtsm@gmail.com
@therecruitchair
The article does not make this clear, but the study found that those who attended both an elite undergraduate school and an elite graduate school earned more, on average, than those who attended a “non-elite” undergraduate school and an elite graduate school. I don’t find this entirely surprising.
Just an initial thought to this article that may/may not be voted down. But, this study doesn’t seem totally accurate. We don’t know what industries their sample size worked in, which could/could not have included the million job reqs that blatantly state ‘MBA’ only. In such instances, I imagine there is a significant amount of people who went to pursued small undergrad and elite grad schools to make more money in these MBA only positions.
(scratch “pursued” from that last sentence – apologies)
I knew it couldn’t be my fault…
Welp. Happy Monday.
Why does that graph suck? What the hell does $2013 mean….
$2013 means that all the incomes reported have been adjusted for inflation and inflated or deflated to their value in 2013 dollars. They do this so you can compare money across time periods.
So I’m bored and I read her article, after adjusting for all relevant factors like, region, race, experience, parents education, etc. her results only hold at a 10% significance level and 5% significance is the standard so the results are inconclusive. And that chart is misleading because it doesn’t adjust for all relevant factors related to income which the author points out in their study.
Because grad degrees are for people who are passionate and passion never makes money unless your passion is making money.