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Insights lost in sundry data

BusinessWeek seems to have flagged off this years’ fall-over-each-other parade for business schools. Business schools, it is widely known, sometimes use their own medicines and do make a good case for them, even if it takes bending few rules to stay ahead. The accompanying chart is the business school alumni’s salary survey, and to say the least is very interesting. The chart is the salaries charted out for Top 15 B-schools for 2009.

The survey seems to lack some really concrete that’s because the numbers seem to be rather skewed.

1. The salaries of the Top 3 schools Harvard, Stanford and Wharton seem to far surpass the schools of UCLA, Ross and Kelley.

2. What could possibly explain the plateau of the salaries in first five years, even decline in some cases; to plateau after 15 years? Are we to assume that only period of growth is the career between 5th to 15th years?

3. The survey shows the salary growing 100% over the period of 20 years. That is simply improbable because a good deal of inflation would take care all the upsides.

4. It is interesting that except for few outliers in the sample of 15 all the other institutions seem to congregate in a bandwidth, this can perhaps be explained by the industry’s average salary (generally); which could further imply there is little differentiation among these b-school!

There are lots of factors that are part of these figures, and like every statistical figure (and especially when it relates to advertising of b-schools) the frills are visible and facts, hidden. Look closer and you will see greater insights into career paths.

Source: BusinessWeek
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