College Analytica
The best education for your future
High-Value Colleges
College Analytica Research Team, May 2022
Below are top college alumni’s earnings based on data from the IRS and college loan lenders. So, they are far more reliable than small-sample anecdotal or self-reported data.
TABLE 1: HIGHEST-EARNERS-PRODUCING COLLEGES, FOR 75TH PERCENTILE EARNERS, 2015 (y.a.e = years after enrollment)
Highest-Earners-Producing (“HEPest”) colleges tend to have very low admission rates. See FIGURE 1 for evidence.
FIGURE 1 HIGHEST-EARNERS-PRODUCING (HEPEST) COLLEGES TEND TO HAVE LOW ADMISSION RATES
(Lighter color = higher SAT or ACT scores)
ADMISSION STATISTICS FROM 2015:
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About a thousand colleges admit 99+% of applicants.
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A little over 100 colleges admit 1 in every 2 applicants.
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If you are a top 1/10 applicant, then 99+% of US colleges would admit you.
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Nine colleges had admission rates lower than 1/11.
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The lowest admission rate, Stanford admitted only 1 student per 19 applicants in 2015 (1 in 30 in 2022!).
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Lighter dots correspond to higher SAT scores
Another fact that stands out from FIGURE 1: HEPest colleges require high SAT (or ACT) scores.
FIGURE 2 MEDIAN BACHELORS' EARNING PLOTTED AGAINST 75TH PERCENTILE SAT SCORE.
High-earners-producing colleges tend to require high SAT scores.
Extremely HEP outliers are listed in the inset. They are colleges with very high proportion of Health Care or Engineering majors.
To gain admision to a top college, you need to be in the top of your high school graduating class, have a top SAT/ACT score, and get As in challenging courses. Also, the trickiest part of college applications is the essays; they must tell a compelling story in your life. Unfortunately, those bare minima are not nearly enough. Above all, you must have a great “spike” or two huge ones. Hundreds of web sites can explain to you what a spike is. The one we link here is just an example. Learn from those web sites and the sites of your dream top colleges. Then, if you still have questions on how to position yourself for admission for those colleges, you may contact us below.
Also noteworthy is that the outliers in the earning-vs-SAT plot are colleges that have high percentages of their students in the Health Care or Engineering (including Computer Science) majors.
TO MAKE A GOOD COLLEGE APPLICATION, THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO BE IN LIFE
The very top HEPest colleges are big on Health Care or Engineering. They tend to have high proportions of their students in STEM majors -- these days especially Computer Science (CS). That was why our College Analytica team member M applied only to colleges that are ranked high in CS although he knows how to get admitted to any type of college. M got admitted to every single college he applied to, thanks to a method developed by his College Analytica team.
WE ARE HERE TO HELP
To ensure a good future, you need to secure admission to top colleges. Our team at College Analytica is here to help you. Ideally, you should start preparing for college admission in ninth grade. However, anytime before 12th grade is not terribly late. The more time you give yourself to prepare, the better the result.
We can offer you valuable advice. Here at College Analytica we have gone through all that you will go though: applying and being admitted to top colleges. "M" was admitted to MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Caltech, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Yale and other top colleges, thanks to the method we developed. "D" graduated from Yale, and now is doing research at MIT. "JH" is also doing research at MIT, after graduating from UC Berkeley. "A" is going to medical school. She was admitted to MIT, Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins (the top three colleges in Biomedical Engineering), Vanderbilt and other top colleges. Antonio has a PhD in engineering, has taught at a top-10 college, and was part of the admission committee. In the past he was admitted to MIT, Columbia and other such colleges. Now he is getting his fourth degree, from U Penn. "JP" is at Stanford. He was admitted to MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale and other HEPest colleges. When it comes to your admissibility to top colleges, we want to get you to the "blue tail of the bell curve" in the logo of College Analytica. In general, top colleges admit fewer than 10% of applicants. With our help, your chances are closer to 50%. Our admission records at several top colleges are actually close to 100%.
Download here a spreadsheet containing information on about 400 colleges whose bachelor's alumni earn the highest-earning six years or ten years after enrollment, created by CollegeAnalytica. Click the icon to download.
REFERENCES
College Scorecard Data by Field of Study; Technical Documentation; United States Department of Education. Washington, DC, 2021; https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/assets/FieldOfStudyDataDocumentation.pdf
Digest of Education Statistics (Fields of Study); National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2019; https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.asp
Seeger, J. A Starter Guide to College for Clueless Students & Parents: For a State College or the Ivy League, Here's What You Need to Know; Starter Guides LLC, 2018; ISBN 0999586025, 344p.
Sumali, M., 2020, “College Cost-Benefit Analysis with Pandas and Seaborn”, New Mexico Journal of Science, 54(2), 122-157.
https://www.nmas.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/nmjs-54.2-sumali.pdf
US News And World Report College Compass Premium Subscription https://premium.usnews.com/best-colleges
"Varying Degrees", 2022, New America, https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2022/explore-the-data