PayScale Names The Colleges With The Highest Mid-Career Salaries

According to salary data site PayScale's list of the colleges with the highest mid-career salaries, Princeton is your best bet for future financial success. The New Jersey university is the only school on the list with a mid-career salary of more than $125,000. This may seem impressive but, before the recession, five schools (MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, Stanford and, of course, Princeton) all had mid-career salaries firmly in the six figures.

PayScale's study, which surveyed graduates from more than 1,003 schools, also reveals that the recession continues to have an impact on post-college pay. The average salary of the top 10 school is $116,900, down 2.7% from 2010 and 6.5% from 2008.

Graduates who got an advanced degree beyond a bachelors were not included in PayScale's survey.

Check out the list below. Are you surprised, pleased or shocked by anything on the list? Tell us in the comments section.

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1. Princeton University $130,000

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Comments

[Jab Allen]

03:44 PM on 08/06/2011

I'm not sure what a mid career timeframe is. Ten years after graduating?
I saw Yale in another version of this same survey, but Stanford should make it too, although who can tell?

[SmoothMineral]

01:29 PM on 07/26/2011

Shocked that Yale and Stanford aren't up there.

[realpragmatist]

01:41 AM on 07/26/2011

Anyone on Cal?
How do their undergraduates in Biology fare in getting into research and into medical schools?
Will appreciate if anyone has any inputs.

[Pierogi kid]

09:30 AM on 07/22/2011

1) is the respondants' data taken at their word or somehow verified like from tax returns?
2) how do you control for subsequent training like advanced degrees?
3) how do you control for the effects of geography?
4) how do you control for the effect of the economic cycles over time?
whole thing sounds a bit sketchy

[Blackorpheus]

12:05 AM on 07/22/2011

Money, money. Always comes down to $$$, doesn't it?

[jtthomas240]

03:36 PM on 07/26/2011

Guess it's one of those, get out what you put in?

[Jab Allen]

03:40 PM on 08/06/2011

Economics tells us that money is "a store of Value." So these colleges give more Value. Well, anyway, even Obama and Biden don't give much to charity, per their tax returns, so who is to judge?
And if you read the intro, it says that these averages do not include those who got advanced degrees, so only bachelor degrees.
As for economic cycles, the survey was taken at one point in time, so the relative places for each university is unaffected by earlier economic conditions.
I imagine each of these top universities does its own survey of its graduates and keeps as accurate a record of data as it can. I assume that lying is approximately equal among them all.
The geography of these universities is not very diverse, so that would not seem relevant, although it does indicate where its students come from to some extent, not where they go to work.

[MMRDO]

05:22 PM on 07/21/2011

Yay Fort Schuyler finally made it up here!

[BroccoliD]

04:57 PM on 07/21/2011

Mid-career salaries?

So, this is a list of the best places to enroll in college 25 years ago?

[PirateJohn]

07:05 PM on 07/21/2011

Well, if you can invent a time machine, I'm pretty sure you have other ways of becoming rich.

"Red Sox are up by two runs with two outs? Meh, I'll bet ya a million dollars that Buckner guy over there messes up and the Mets win!"

[TicTucTo]

04:40 PM on 07/21/2011

It seems my school (University of the Sciences in Philadelphia) got knocked off the list this year! Last year we were number twelve...

[Burt Goldberg]

04:35 PM on 07/21/2011

Sorry these are not excessive salaries when you consider each faculty member holds an earned PhD, average is 6 years of work, a Post-Doctoral fellowship and in the sciences, the usual is 2 of these lasting 3 to 4 years, then you look for an Assistant Professorship, and it take 7 more years to reach Professor. Lets look at lawyers, accountants and physicans salaries. Love to see the comparison. As for Presidents we educate them, you elected them. A little late to complain.

[Christine Gritmon]

04:48 PM on 07/21/2011

Burt it wasn't faculty salaries, it was average mid-career salaries of graduates of these schools who did not pursue higher degrees.

[IWantTofu]

02:31 PM on 07/28/2011

OP was a Farleigh Dickenson graduate.

[KG1]

04:50 PM on 07/21/2011

Um... the survey was of graduates' mid-career salaries, not faculty salaries.

And the salaries measured were of bachelors' degree holders who did NOT go on to professional or grad schools, so alumni who went on to medical or law school weren't counted.

[liberalcynic]

04:30 PM on 07/21/2011

There are universities outside of the US.
Might want to look at: Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, LSE, Edinburgh, St Andrews in the UK
the University of Sydney, the Australian National University and the university of Melbourne in Australia.
In Japan, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima and Kyoto all have stellar results in terms of pay.

You might want to look outside the US, universities exist outside of it!

[MMRDO]

05:11 PM on 07/21/2011

For sea going stuff, Fort Schuyler (Maritime College) is your best bet, the Turks, Koreans, Chinese, they come here.

[prophile]

01:56 PM on 07/22/2011

HuffPost is not yet a global website, so it's still very much U.S.-focused. (Though they recently added HuffPost Canada.)

[iHELP Loans]

04:27 PM on 07/21/2011

Good info...although, not exactly surprising!

[KG1]

04:20 PM on 07/21/2011

No surprise that a subset of the Ivy League made the list, nor that CalTech, Stanford, MIT and Duke are right up there. But it's striking that three smallish schools in the mid-Atlantic region's Patriot League - Lehigh, Colgate, and Bucknell - also made the list. They all have excellent undergrad programs, but don't have the sort of nationwide name recognition, endowment, or graduate school infrastructure of the "usual suspect" universities. Guess these little guys - along with Harvey Mudd in California - must be doing something right.

[innerview]

04:05 PM on 07/21/2011

So what? Careers are a thing of the past--a relic of depression-era security needs. Most careers require giving the best years of your life to a corporate master. For what? Security? What security? For this salary, you get to work 50+ hours a week, travel away from home in many cases, and endure endless dramas to properly position yourself within the hierarchy. In most cases, you must constantly prove yourself while watching your back. Some life! Wanna live? Do anything that doesn't require sale of yourself. Live with less. Walk with good intentions for all.

[Vic22]

04:42 PM on 07/21/2011

I agree, too bad we were all duped into getting into a ton of debt. Once they have you with tens of thousands of dollars of loans, you have to work and they own you

[fancynancy1984]

03:27 PM on 07/21/2011

Yes. But good luck in getting tenure at Harvard or Yale!

[GBO]

02:44 PM on 07/21/2011

University of Phoenix!!!!!