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Comment by rglovejoy | Hacker News Reader

> At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year.

Bennington always impressed me as as rich kids' school. I have to wonder how many of these former students are living off of trust funds.

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Interesting. He also calls out Bard. That rang a bell for me so I looked it up. 31% of 2014 graduates were in the visual and performing arts. Maybe some of these schools just attract people who aren't expecting to have a strong economic return on their investment.

He calls out schools where the students aren't repaying their loans later. It might be interesting to analyze the data to relate income to repayment of student loans (or lack of loans altogether.) It would be interesting to see if there are schools where the students make no money but pay back their loans on time.

I went to Bennington for two years, and while it has that reputation, and there are some rich kids running around (myself included), there are a surprising number of working and middle class kids going there, and then coming out of school with no prospects.

Anecdotally, there are a surprising number of waiters, baristas, and other people doing jobs that are in no way informed by their years of study.

FWIW my good friend went to Bennington and nothing she studied in school is remotely applicable to life... Let alone work. That said she had a really good time.

I looked at the data and was struck by the fact that the top schools by ten-year earnings were medical schools. This led me to believe that the data doesn't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs. If that's the case, then an undergrad-focused school like Bennington is going to be penalized versus a school that has mostly grad students. If your pool of students is, say, 70% grad students, then they're going to be further along in their careers at the ten year mark than an institution where 90% of students are undergrads.

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