College Students and Future Income

A large part of the value of advertising to young people is that successful advertising to that demographic can capture a customer for more buying years that it would to an older demographic. College students are especially valuable because the lifetime earning potential of someone with a bachelor’s degree over someone without one is about 75% higher or $900,000 more, according to Yahoo! Education. But not all bachelor’s degrees are treated the same. Turning a college student at a highly rated university into a lifetime customer is incredibly valuable.

There are a variety of different rating systems for colleges, including the famous US News and World Report annual ranking of the United States’ top universities. However, the ranking system that gets straight to the bottom line is PayScale’s ranking system, which ranks colleges by both average starting salary and average mid-career salary of graduates. That’s very valuable information for companies who seek to advertise to college students.

In terms of average starting salary, there are some familiar names in the top-10, including both the US Naval Academy and the US Military Academy, which come in 1^st and 2^nd respectively. The US Air Force Academy comes into 8^th, while big names like MIT and CalTech come in 4^th and 5^th respectively. However, surprises like Harvey Mudd College (3^rd), Colorado School of Mines (6^th), and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (7^th) also come in very high. All of those schools have an average starting income of $64,000 or more, which means a lot of disposable income.

In terms of average mid-career salary, Harvey Mudd comes in at the top, ahead of big name schools like the Naval Academy (2^nd), CalTech (3^rd), Babson College (5^th), Princeton University (6^th), the Military Academy (7^th), Stanford, Harvard, Brown (tied for 8^th), CalTech (11^th), and Yale (12^th). Students at all those schools make an average of $110,000 or more yearly at that point in their careers, putting them well into the upper middle class.

OnCampus Advertising has advertising capabilities at all of these schools and many more to help you reach these high income potential students and turn them into lifetime users of your product and lifetime brand loyal customers of your brand.