Duke outearns Cornell to take salary championship
— -- Duke University may not have a No. 1 seed in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, but it comes in first in a way that all of its students can appreciate: Duke graduates are paid more than the graduates of the 64 other schools in the competition.
The median annual salary of Duke alumni who graduated five to 15 years ago is $102,000, according to PayScale, which says it has the world's largest salary database of more than 16 million.
Duke is a runaway champion in USA TODAY's March Madness salary bracket, which uses PayScale data and can be found here. Runner-up universities are Cornell ($91,700), Southern California ($91,600) and California ($91,400), although Michigan ($84,000) and not California advances to the salary Final Four out of a weaker bracket.
Who are the worst-paid graduates five to 15 years out of college? Alabama State's at $41,800 followed by Morehead State's at $45,400, the last two seeds in the basketball tournament and scheduled to play in the tournament's first game today to get the field down to an even 64.
Last year, Duke had the third-highest median salary among March Madness contestants. Neither of the 2008 salary finalists, Stanford and Notre Dame, advanced into the basketball tournament this year. Stanford grads remain the best paid among all universities at $115,000 a year, PayScale says.
The Duke alumni office does not track statistics that measure the incomes of its graduates, university spokesman Keith Lawrence says.
"We are proud of the financial success, but we measure our graduates' accomplishments in a lot more ways than the size of a paycheck," says William Wright-Swadel, executive director of Duke's career center.
Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis, says PayScale has more data from some schools than it does others. For example, it has 5,000 salaries from graduates of the University of Washington and slightly more than 100 from Alabama State, but says the Alabama State data still are statistically valid.
