Your tax dollars at work: Harvard grads still earning less than California State prison guards

by philg

Back in 2011, the Wall Street Journal ran “California Prison Academy: Better Than a Harvard Degree” in which journalist Allysia Finley ran the numbers to determine that, at least on an economic basis, it made more sense to become a California prison guard than a Harvard grad working at a median wage.

The Federal Government’s new web site shows that Finley’s calculations remain relevant. The median pre-tax income of a Harvard graduate, ten years after enrollment, is $87,200. Harvard is big on making public school graduates take a gap year so let’s assume this person is earning $87,200. In Massachusetts, according to the ADP paycheck calculator, that’s $60,350 per year after taxes.

[Note that a superior spending power could also be obtained via the Massachusetts child support system. If instead of going to Harvard, a young person had sex with a dermatologist or Medicaid dentist and obtained custody of the resulting child, the child support revenue for a single child would likely exceed the median Harvard graduate’s spending power. In New York City, the same income would result in $56,740 per year of spending power. That amount of tax-free child support revenue could be obtained by having sex with someone earning $333,764 (NY chapter).]

Separately, note that the U.S. failed to accomplish what Chile has done, i.e., limiting the student loans available depending on the historical return on investment from a degree (see previous posting). The New York Times has an article on how the government’s cronies managed to block a Chile-like ranking (a Chilean-style hard limit on $$ was never contemplated, apparently).

6 thoughts on “Your tax dollars at work: Harvard grads still earning less than California State prison guards”

  1. I can’t imagine a less pleasant job than being a prison guard. Add to that that you have to live in some truly desolate and undesirable parts of the country.

    I am always supplied by these comparisons. The first one I remember was from the teacher’s union in New York: “teachers make less money then sanitation men!”. I don’t know if this is still true.

    The working conditions of teachers and of Harvard grads are much, much better than those of sanitation men and prison guards. Why shouldn’t this be a major factor in their compensation?

  2. Uhhh, the Fed Government’s web site says that the ten years later salary is only for those taking Federal financial aid. And lower down, it says only 3% of Harvard students take Federal loans (expand the financial aid & debt section).

    So what about the other 97% of Harvard grads, what is their median pre-tax income?

  3. I have a friend who married a California prison warden. My friend made in excess of seven figures on company stock in addition to a six figure salary and he told me his wife’s pension has a higher net present value than his life’s savings in his career as an engineer. In addition, they get superior health care + his wife has the most insane, surreal, bizarre stories from being warden of a women’s prison. I love talking to her at parties!

  4. Brian: Obviously the working conditions for a California prison guard are so horrible that only 120,000 applied for the 900 openings in a typical year that Ms. Finley wrote about. Sort of like schoolteachers being so “underpaid” that there are only 300-400 applications from qualified candidates for the typical teaching job.

    John: Hmm… good point on the data selectivity. If it were only 3% then I guess this new federal data set doesn’t add too much to the numbers the WSJ put forth in 2011. (Though under “socio-economic diversity” the same site says that “10% of students have a family income less than $40k and receive an income-based federal Pell Grant to help pay for college”. And I would think that a federally-guaranteed loan would also qualify as “federal financial aid”. Wouldn’t most students be eligible for that? [Speaking of loans, http://www.wsj.com/articles/student-debt-payback-lags-1442189980 says that the smart kids don’t even try to pay them back.]

    Jay: I have a friend who retired, in his mid-40s, with a comfortable pension from the Alaska state prison system. He loved his job, made a lot of friends among the inmates, and has fantastic stories. Both at work and in retirement he has always seemed much happier than the software engineers that I know.

  5. You make many references in your blog posts to woman having affairs and children out of wedlock for monetary gain. I wonder what drives you to make this reference so often in your writing and why you have put so much effort into researching the topic. Are you promoting this as an option for young women? Are you trying to warn rich men about this vulnerability? Are you trying to convince your readers to lead an effort to try change the system?

    As for prison guards vs engineers being happy I don’t think it is the job that makes you happy or unhappy but how you perceive it. Sean Achor in his TED talk makes the point that your environment is not a good predictor of your how happy you will be but it is how you perceive your environment. I wonder if what predisposes someone to be an engineer also predisposes them to view everything as a problem to be fixed.

    That might explain much of your own writing where you seem to see the world as a broken place that is full of inefficient or broken systems with people intent on abusing the systems for personal gain.

    I encourage you to watch Sean’s talk and consider trying to scan the world for the positive instead of the negative.

    http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?language=en

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