In retrospect, you may be right, when factoring in the different size of the student populations. But nonetheless, I stand by the point that going to a good State school is a perfectly sufficient step to have a good - even amazing - career. Keep in mind that there are only, well, 500, S&P 500 CEOs. But a pretty damn successful and amazing career might be being the CEO of a multi-million dollar textile manufacturer in South Carolina, that nobody on HN has ever heard of.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
This is independent of school -- if someone like Steve Jobs didn't go to college for very long, he'd be fine (oh wait, he was).
I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.
There's that payscale list of best ROI per college which mostly confirms this, but there are some colleges in the top 20 I wouldn't have thought of (Duke, Babson, Harvey Mudd).
Means or even medians are probably not terribly useful (Stanford and Harvard should be crushing the stats just based on Google/Facebook/etc.). A school which has a lot of people who go into public service or other low compensation positions would also be unfairly penalized.
"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".
On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.
But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.
Yeah, I saw that :( And I think Olin may have changed their policy a few years ago (I'm not sure); seems to have tuition now, and a half scholarship for everyone.
I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
I don't know... their data either has to lag calendar time substantially, or be heavily based on inference or other statistical techniques that might not reflect reality. It may be accurate as a snapshot of a "point in time" but I'd be reluctant to judge any trends based on that, right now.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.