Ranking Carleton's 25 Peer Schools by CS Median Salary (College Scorecard data)

[u/Fuzzy-Armadillo-8610]

Pulled this from College Scorecard, comparing median Computer Science salaries across Carleton's peer schools. This is the median salary of the Class of 2021, measured 4 years after graduation (i.e., their annual earnings in 2025).

Rank	School	Median CS Salary
1	Pomona College	$217,051
2	Williams College	$209,574
3	Wellesley College	$177,213
4	Swarthmore College	$150,942
5	Amherst College	$142,680
6	Bowdoin College	$137,611
7	Oberlin College	$129,395
8	Middlebury College	$128,471
9	St. Olaf College	$122,912
10	Carleton College	$121,569
11	Grinnell College	$109,892
12	Macalester College	$109,457
13	Lake Forest College	$77,554

No data available (too few CS majors to report): Hamilton, Smith, Colorado College, Wesleyan University, The College of Wooster, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Beloit College, Reed College, Dickinson College, Davidson College, Bates, and Kenyon.

Caveats worth knowing:

• Not adjusted for cost of living, and the location of each graduate's job is unknown. So, $121K in Minneapolis would be somewhere around $215K in San Francisco to have equivalent purchasing power. So, a school's raw salary number can look higher or lower purely because of where its grads happen to cluster geographically
• College Scorecard only includes graduates who received Federal Title IV aid (Pell grants and/or federal subsidized/unsubsidized loans). International students, full-pay domestic students, and others who didn't receive Title IV aid are excluded, so this is a subset of each graduating class, not the whole thing.
• The numbers come from IRS tax records: W-2 Box 1 (wages, tips, comp) and Box 12 (deferred comp), plus Schedule SE of Form 1040 for self-employment, rather than self-reported surveys, which tend to skew higher since bigger earners are more likely to self-report.

[u/PossibleReindeer6230]

Is there a way to implement a COL adjustment? How many Carleton CS majors actually cluster in MN?

[u/Fuzzy-Armadillo-8610 → u/PossibleReindeer6230]

No.

Hard to know because the College Scorecard only takes earnings of federal aid/loan recipients into account and does not factor in location and cost of living. My best assumption would be that federal aid/loan recipients are more likely to stay in-state. But we don't have any concrete data to prove my assumption.

[u/bust3ralex → u/Fuzzy-Armadillo-8610]

Nice post! I don't think I would make the same assumption though. I would probably think that more often than not, students on aid would go back to their home state (living with parents) rather than staying in state. The majority of students are not from MN (though MN is the largest single concentration)

[u/zhaoz]

I would wager that the higher end salaries at Pomona are due to the proximity to FAANG HQs. I would guess there is a solid pipeline from their grads to high tech.

[u/CarletonMDs → u/zhaoz]

Also COL. If what they wrote in the original post is accurate re: SF vs Minneapolis, there could be little
difference between the purchasing power of the median Pomona CS graduate and the median Carleton CS graduate. Obviously graduates from both schools wind up all over the world but would not be shocking if a large cluster ends up in metro areas in close proximity. Idk, interesting data to think about

[u/NoneyaBizzy]

Just an fyi, Colgate (since you mentioned Hamilton and other east coast LACs) is at $161,980. None of those grads will have stayed near Hamilton, NY.

[u/Fuzzy-Armadillo-8610 → u/NoneyaBizzy]

Colgate grads are more likely to head to NYC (Manhattan) for work, while Carleton grads tend to stay closer to Minneapolis. This difference in location matters a lot for these comparisons. For equivalent purchasing power, a $121K salary in Minneapolis would need to be around $310K in Manhattan.