[Uroboric]

I feel like a tremendous factor behind the numbers for middle-tier schools is simple geography. For example, I make more than double what many of my college friends who I consider at least equally as smart and motivated as I make, and it's pretty clear that the only reason is I chose to move to California whereas they stayed in Nevada.

Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student's job into account in some way.

[kspaans]

Does your comparison with your friends take location into account? E.g. if you're in SF and they're in Reno, then expatistan[0] claims your costs are 57% higher.

0 - http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/reno/san...?

[CydeWeys]

Cost of living is hard to account for; it's definitely not just some percentage multiplier. For instance, my cost of living went up by about $5K/year to move to Manhattan (rent went up by a lot, which was partially offset by no longer having transportation costs). But my salary went up by over $100K. Yet a cost of living calculator says that Manhattan is significantly more expensive, and that an, e.g., $200K salary is only "worth" $114K in low-cost areas like Reno, which practically speaking, isn't true for me at all. I'm saving more money per year than what my post-tax salary in Reno would be in its entirety, which itself is an unlikely situation because the Big 4 don't have offices in Reno and I suspect there aren't a huge number of well-compensated developer jobs there, even at the $160K or so level that would yield the same savings left over as a $200K job in NYC.

You're always better off making a given salary in a higher CoL area than the equivalent salary in a lower CoL area, because not everything scales linearly with CoL (e.g. ordering goods off Amazon, or going on vacations), and your higher salary thus gets you more purchasing power on lots of goods and services.

[hueving]

>even at the $160K or so level that would yield the same savings left over as a $200K job in NYC.

200k in NYC has an estimated 82.7K tax burden and 160k in Reno has an estimated 50.3k tax burden.[1] That means that you only have about 18k more in NYC. So something is messed up for your calculation unless you are living on <=18k in NYC.

1. https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

[kspaans]

Indeed, not to mention things like sales tax! I recently moved from Canada to the UK, and the VAT being 20% compared to 13% in Ontario is a little jarring sometimes.

[CydeWeys]

Same situation for me, except with different locations (to New York City). There are so many factors that need to be controlled for here.