WSJ compensation survey

The WSJ has posted some interesting compensation data which can be sorted by college and degree type. The data covers people less than 5 years out of school and more than 10 years out ("mid-career"), in all cases excluding those that earned advanced degrees -- so that the outcomes are most sensitive to the undergraduate background of the respondents. Note you can click the column heading to sort by that variable (starting salary, 75 percentile mid-career salary, etc.).

There's also an accompanying article. The author notes that schools (Ivies) at which a large fraction of students head into finance tend to have the highest starting and mid-career averages. Engineers have high starting salaries but not as much appreciation.

A social scientist can now regress the salaries on avg SAT and school / major to calculate the economic "value add" for a particular major or institution. (See UT Austin data here.) A significant confound is that people who *do* get advanced degrees would not appear in this data. (Almost half of all Caltech undergrads get PhDs and probably well over half get other advanced degrees.)

Some random results:

Caltech grads had the highest median starting salaries at $75k; by midcareer Dartmouth is number one with median compensation of $134k (MIT $126k, Caltech $123k).

Salaries by degree | starting | 10th-90th percentile midcareer range

Physics | $50k | $56k -- $178k
EE | $60k | $69k -- $168k
English | $38k | $33k -- $136k
Economics | $50k | $50k -- $210k
Philosophy | $40k | $35k -- $168

• Survey respondents included two sets of U.S. bachelor's degree graduates: Full-time workers with 5.5 years of experience or less and full-time employees with 10 or more years of experience.

• The survey excluded respondents who reported having advanced degrees, including M.B.A.s, M.D.s and J.D.s. Self-employed, project-based, and contract employees were also not included.

• Salary included annual cash compensation, including base salary or hourly wages, combined with commissions, bonuses, profit sharing and other forms of cash earnings.