Average Ivy League Grad Is POOR?!

169k roughly puts them in the top 10% of earners. As a graduate! They are clearly not poor.

There are several reasons behind this

1. Harvard has plenty of international students from Europe and Asia and Canada etc. Those people convert their currency into US dollar.

2. Privileged rich people like to go into nonprofit org and research institute. They’d rather work for an enjoyable and meaningful job that pays 60k than working for 250k as a corporate monkey. For example, openAI researchers were getting pennies but they were also changing the world. That’s the type of job that rich kids love

3. Lots of Harvard kids don’t even have a salary. They live by trust funds and family companies’ profit share. Who would work in investment banking when they are the clients of private equity ??? Lmao

4. People only report base pay when doing the mid-career surveys. Rsu, bonus, carry, all oblivious from survey

making 169k + assuming you have a wife/husband making income can be pretty comfortable if you aren't in a HCOL city (which there are many).

also in terms of children of rich parents i would assume their parents have forms of passive income like real estate that they pass down and im not sure if they 169k will account for that

Please look up median & mean household income in America + poverty levels. I am a pure red blooded capitalist but this is just an absurd post. That's great money by most standards. 

Assuming you’re either in college or an analyst. You’re completely overestimating how much people make. Do you think people in medicine voluntarily spend decades in school and residency to make $300k to $1m when everyone can just be a CEO, HF manager, PE partner, IB MD or even a consulting partner making $1m to $10m+ a year? Hardly anyone gets there. Most people burn out over a few years.

Many women, including Ivy grads, choose to either work part-time or cease work entirely at "mid-career" if they have a family. Many decide not to reenter the work force later. 

Not for Ivy grads specifically, but the average primary care physician makes $260k, the average developer makes $110k, the average lawyer makes $125k, the average professor makes $80k,  the average engineer makes $95k. 
 

In any of these professions it’s going to be hard to break out from the median wage, because these are non-revenue-driving jobs and you can be pretty easily replaced by someone else at a lower cost. You have to do something different, not just be a grad from a good school. If you’re a doctor you have to be a specialist or own a practice. If you’re a lawyer you have to be in Big Law or own a practice. If you’re a developer you have to be at one of a handful of firms or a startup the has success. None of those things are the median outcome. It’s really rare for someone to make +$500k per year consistently. 

My buddy from my frat at Cornell is from a 10–20-billion-dollar European family that you will not find any information about on the internet because its insanely old money and it is all private. 

He works part time as a bouncer (6'5, 230 all muscle) because it is fun while also supplementing his meager income (30k a year) working for a food bank in NYC. He anonymously donates his entire salary back to said food bank. 

He is the sweetest kid I know and is incredibly quiet and reserved. One time when we were out, some girls started making fun of him for working at a foodbank in WV and he took it in stride. If only they knew.

He lives in a penthouse his parents own in the UWS and has gotten access to 100MM of his inheritance when he graduated college and will get another 100MM when he is 25, 30, and 45. This is separate from the actual inheritance he will get once his parents pass. 

No way average lse grad salary is 55k btw. It'll be a lot less

Simple reason why. Lot of other posters have mentioned some good reasons but the main one ultimately comes down to the fact that so many of these kids pursue completely useless majors with no hard skills (European literature, gender studies, etc). If you have interest in these topics, do it in your free time -- not as a major that you spend $100+k taking debt out on to do. Or minor in it while majoring in something with a practical skillset. I love history but I didn't major in it -- I just read about it in my free time

You have so many kids thinking all they needed was the college degree but that the major didn't matter or who put virtually no thought into their post-grad futures. I would refuse to pay for the college if I had a kid who wasn't majoring in STEM + B. Just makes no sense relative to the cost of going to college (which is skyrocketing and will continue to do so in future). 

I know multiple 'liberal arts' majors who are literally working as baristas or some corporate job with the pay ceiling at 80k in a decade (40k today). People are finally, slowly waking up to this fact as fewer people believe in college than before (unless they are doing STEM + B) and as tech companies are now structurally (in my view) cutting out bloat as every CEO is thinking about how to unleash their inner Elon -- as most of them could have much higher profitability vs what they have today

This whole post reeks of entertainment. While that certainly isn’t a phenomenal salary it’s pretty solid and respectable. Working finance may have gotten your calibration off.