Eric R. Eide and Michael J. Hilmer in The Wall Street Journal caution that attending a prestigious school might not automatically translates into a higher salary after graduation. An analysis of the salaries of thousands of college graduates a decade after they got out of school found that prestigious diplomas boost earnings significantly for some professions with business and other liberal arts majors. However, in fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, the average starting salary differs by less than $1,000 for engineering graduates of the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania and those of Texas A&M, for instance, but the tuition difference is more than $167,000. That means STEM students could be ringing up unnecessary debt going for a brand-name degree instead of going to state’s flagship school like University of Alabama. (wsj.com)
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