A Tale of NY Nursing

When I started looking through this data, I had some ideas about what I would find. I figured Computer Science and Engineering would be at the top of the earnings chart. I figured the rest of the engineering majors would fill in underneath and nursing would be somewhere up there too. I was right about all of that, but what I didn't expect was so much variability.

The top colleges have expected earnings near or over $100k! Mercy College in New York reports an expected salary 1 year after graduation of $115,000 for nurses! On the other hand, some smaller colleges in Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri only average $47,000-$54,000. And don't get me started on Puerto Rico, where all salaries seem to be about half of what they are in the lower 48.

Nursing is an interesting case study because it has similar to a trade. An RN is certified professionally and the base skills and needs are relatively consistent. Nurses are needed everywhere, the jobs are mostly similar and the variability in salary is mostly focused around location.

Like it or not, there's no insane outliers in nursing, like Google or Facebook in Computer Science, where you can grab a ton of salary or equity and make millions. Google salaries in Mountain View, CA aren't high because it's expensive to live there. It's actually reversed! Mountain View is expensive because Google has been so damn profitable and there's a gazillion rich developers running around.

Nurse.org breaks down location variability per state, with Puerto Rico and Alabama at the bottom and California and Hawaii at the top. Alabama nurses average $61,000 and while California nurses earn on average $124,000. A lot of this has to do with large healthcare companies like Kaiser Permanente or unionization (big in NY and CA), but the end result is easy to see per-state:

NY Case Study

Location is a key factor in nursing salaries, and the expected earnings from colleges reflect this. So I decided to compare two schools as a little example.

In New York, the average RN salary is $93,320. I found two New York colleges where nursing majors have earnings right at the average. Here they are:

New York University, Earnings After 1 Year - $93,346:

(The nursing school proudly states: "Our undergraduate alumni have the highest median salaries at NYU"!)

Farmingdale State College, Earnings After 1 Year - $93,684:

Farmingdale is on Long Island, only about 20 miles away from Manhattan. So they're very close geographically. Now let's look at the big difference between the two, which I'm sure you can already guess:

New York University- Yearly Costs: $73,759- Average Debt Load of Nursing Graduates: $68,187

Farmingdale State College- Yearly Costs: $16,856- Average Debt Load of Nursing Grads: $19,338

Now I know NYU is a prestigious university. But I think we still need to ask ourselves: what are you paying for?

What do you go to college for? What is it's purpose in modern times? There's something more here beyond career earnings that must be priced into the overall cost. In the case of NYU, there's a long history of prestige and academic rigor that is going to matter more in some fields than others. Does it matter for most nurses? Probably not.