As seen on SmartAsset.com
Most college students are on a tight budget for four years, making minimum wage at the pizza place on campus – but when graduation comes, who’s earning the most dough? A recent study by SmartAsset measured exactly that, finding the schools where graduates earn the highest average starting salaries.
Check the table below to see how schools in South Carolina ranked:
University of South Carolina Upstate, South Carolina State University, Coastal Carolina University and Winthrop University ranked 7 – 10, respectively.
See: The Citadel comes out #1 in research about the “10 Best Value Colleges in South Carolina” here
SmartAsset methodology
Methodology Earning a college degree can increase your skill set, job prospects and net worth. But with rising college costs, where you choose to get that degree from can make a big difference. SmartAsset looked at five factors to determine the best value colleges and universities: tuition, student living costs, scholarship and grant offerings, retention rate and starting salary.
To capture the true cost of attending a school, we included the tuition (using in-state tuition for public schools where applicable), student living costs (including room and board, books, supplies, transportation and other personal expenses) and the average scholarships and grants offered to students of the school.
To capture what students get in return, we looked at student retention rate (the percent of students that re-enrolled at the institution the following year) and the average starting salary.
We gave 25% weighting to starting salary, tuition and living costs. We then gave 12.5% weighting to scholarships and grants, as well as student retention rate, to come up with a ranking of schools in our analysis. With that ranking, we created an index (a sort of grading on a curve) where the number one school was assigned 100.
Sources: 2017 National Center for Educational Statistics , 2018 Payscale, The Institute for College Access & Success. College InSight. Student debt and undergraduate financial aid data are licensed from Peterson’s Undergraduate Financial Aid and Undergraduate Databases, © 2017 Peterson’s LLC, all rights reserved. All data may be reproduced, with attribution, subject to restrictions under this Creative Commons license.
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