Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you read the news, you inevitable come across articles like Want a job? Get a computer science degree, which suggest that computer science “grads received an average of 2.3 job offers and had an average starting salary of more than $72,000 – the highest of any starting salary.” Surveys by NACE, such as Top-Paid Majors for 2009-10 Bachelor’s Degree Graduates, rank Computer Science as the fourth most lucrative undergraduate degree, after Petroleum Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Mining & Mineral Engineering. With rising tuition costs, undergrads are feeling more pressure to graduate with majors that will help them repay their student loans and establish themselves.

I noticed that many universities post the results of their alumni employment surveys online, and gathered them into a spreadsheet. I will be looking at Cornell University, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU and UoA. I want to treat each university as a kind of asset, and categorize their volatility and average return. I imagine that the kind of university a prospective student, interested in maximizing his first-year earning potential, would choose would offer the most resilience to downturn, and the highest absolute salary.

Salary over Time per University

It’s clear from the above graph that the University’s ranking is a factor in first-year salary. The cluster of “top private schools” pulls away from the University of Arizona in earnings potential, and maintains an average of 23% more salary dollars in the last 12 years. That’s a significant spread.

Given the downturn during the tech crash of 2001, and the recent financial crisis, it’s worth asking which University will give you better returns than inflation on your salary (all of them), but without too much volatility (standard deviation of returns). As it turns out, there’s only one university in that sweet spot: Cornell University (disclosure: my alma mater).

While Stanford/MIT/UC Berkely have average salary growth of 4.5% per year, they also have an average standard deviation of 8.5% and took a whopping -12% hit in the downturn of 2001. Cornell got by with a -7% return, but has a much more respectable standard deviation of 5% and average salary growth of 4%. Carnegie Melon has a similar deviation in returns, but only with a 2% growth rate.

This is informal analysis; if you have any comments or questions, please drop a note on this post! One obvious shortcoming of this data is that it only records the starting salaries of undergrads, which isn’t a good indicator of total earnings potential for undergraduates of various universities. In the longer view, there may be no difference between undergraduate universities.

Appendix of Data:

• Inflation data from Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers – (CPI-U) – U.S. city average.
• Cornell University data from Annual Starting Salaries 1985 – 2006 and 2008 Employment
• MIT data from their salary survey (only three years, WTF!), and graduating student survey.
• Stanford has a pretty good index page 1997 to 2008.
• UC Berkeley’s What Can I Do With a Major In…?.
• CMU Post Graduation Survey Results from the School of Computer Science.
• University of Arizona’s Career Destinations Results page.

Data is based on mean starting salary. Data is linearly interpolated to form smooth curves where knots are missing. I was unable to find data for Columbia or Princeton, so if you have a source, please let me know and I will update my spreadsheet!

iTunes 8 has a new feature called Genius. Gizmodo says, “In time, Genius playlists should get more useful, but I think I’ll still stick to Pandora when I want to mix things up.” However, I’m pretty satisfied with them, as they provide a non-linear way to dig into related music in your library. For example, Eric Clapton’s classic Old Love brings up a bunch of oldies, as well as some other Eric Clapton / Cream tunes:

If I feel like pop, picking Danity Kane explodes more pop:

And an Ice Cube song brings the hilarity:

iTunes 8 is definitely psychic!

Reading Spat with Rogers leaves Canadian Apple stores without iPhones on Apple Insider leaves me with a sense of unease. It’s certainly Apple’s right to send shipments of the highly desired iPhone 3G where it wants, but to screw an entire country because it doesn’t like the action of one carrier won’t help it’s reputation with Canadians, who now suffer arbitrarily:

Apple, disgusted with Rogers Wireless for dumping egregious service plans on would-be iPhone 3G buyers, has decided that its Canadian retail stores will have no part in helping the carrier market the new handset to customers, AppleInsider has learned.

As a result, Canadian Apple Retail stores won’t be selling the new 3G touchscreen phones come Friday, representatives for the Cupertino-based company said during a private conference call on Monday evening. Instead, it will be up to Rogers and its partner Fido to lock subscribers into steep 3-year contracts that require a minimum monthly payment of $60 for just 150 minutes, 75 text messages, and 400MB of data.

So because Apple doesn’t like Rogers’ unfair pricing, they’re not going to sell their phones in Canada, with this snarky quote “We have nothing to do with the service plans. Those are Rogers’ plans.” On the other hand, iPhone Atlas suggests that Apple never intended to sell the iPhone 3G at any retail location, which would make this fight nothing but FUD.