There is a sentence students say to themselves when they look at their list and feel uneasy about adding a school that admits half its applicants: that would be settling.
The federal earnings data does not support that sentence.
The comparison
The U.S. Department of Education tracks median earnings of former students ten years after they first enrolled. Here is a slice of it, sorted by earnings, with each school's acceptance rate beside it:
| School | Admits | Median earnings, 10 yrs |
|---|---|---|
| MIT | 4.6% | $143,372 |
| Harvey Mudd | 12.7% | $138,687 |
| Albany College of Pharmacy | 59.1% | $131,426 |
| Olin College of Engineering | 25.2% | $129,455 |
| Caltech | 2.6% | $128,566 |
| Stanford | 3.6% | $124,080 |
| Bentley University | 45.1% | $120,959 |
| Carnegie Mellon | 11.7% | $114,862 |
| Penn | 5.4% | $111,371 |
| Princeton | 4.6% | $110,066 |
| Santa Clara | 48.0% | $109,183 |
| Stevens Institute | 47.6% | $108,772 |
| Worcester Polytechnic | 60.2% | $103,470 |
| Rensselaer (RPI) | 63.5% | $102,051 |
| Harvard | 3.7% | $101,817 |
| Yale | 3.9% | $100,533 |
Six of the schools above Harvard's line admit between 45% and 64% of applicants.
What is actually going on
This is not a claim that Bentley beats Harvard. It is a claim about what the earnings number is made of, and the answer is mostly field of study.
Pharmacy, engineering, computer science, accounting, and finance pay well and pay early. Schools concentrated in those fields post high medians almost regardless of selectivity. Schools with broad liberal arts enrollments post lower medians even when their graduates go on to law school, medicine, or academia — those earnings arrive later than the ten-year mark, or arrive as advanced-degree earnings this measure does not follow cleanly.
So the honest reading is not "high-admit schools pay better." It is: selectivity and early-career earnings are far less connected than the ranking conversation implies, and a school''s mix of majors explains more than its admit rate does.
Why this matters for your list specifically
If you are building a top-heavy list and looking for a school to add that raises your odds without feeling like a downgrade, the earnings table gives you somewhere concrete to look. Stevens admits 47.6%. WPI admits 60.2%. Their graduates land, ten years out, roughly where Penn and Princeton graduates land.
That is a very different proposition from "add a safety."
What this number does not tell you
It is a median for the whole institution, not for your intended major. A humanities graduate from a heavily engineering school is not earning the engineering median. If you plan to study English, the institutional median at a polytechnic tells you almost nothing about your outcome.
It also reflects who enrolled, not what the school did to them. A school that admits mostly students already heading into finance will show finance earnings. Separating institutional effect from student selection is genuinely hard, and this number does not attempt it.
Treat it as a signal about what a school produces, not a promise about what it will do for you.
The practical move
Look at the schools on your list that sit above 40% admit rate. If there are none, that is the finding. If there are some, check whether they are in this table or near it — and if they are, the reason to keep them is stronger than "insurance."
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Source
Median earnings ten years after entry, U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, most recent available cohort. Acceptance rates are institution-reported figures published through IPEDS / College Scorecard. Figures are institutional medians across all majors.