This year, my older son is applying to colleges. As anyone who has been through high school knows, this can be one of the most challenging periods in a family's life. Choosing a college in the United States is frightfully confusing: institutions can be ranked on innumerable axes, and there are far too many college and university ranking lists.
Today, I came across one more data point. The New York Times college-degree earnings guide describes recent data on what a college graduate's annual income might be four years after graduation. As you might know, I like looking at all kinds of data, and this was a great excuse to pore over data around a question in which I am clearly invested.
I built a small tool around it: pick a major (or several), search for a college, filter by state, degree, or cohort size, and see reported median earnings across 32,578 undergraduate programs, 539 of them in political science alone. It is a table more than a chart on purpose. Once you start narrowing by major and college at the same time, a table is just easier to read than almost anything fancier.
Open the College Earnings Explorer →
Ritwik Sinha — Cupertino, CA