[Roberton3]

What's the methodology of payscale.com? Is it based on people self-reporting their salaries on the payscale.com website?

Yep, and I'm sure that people who self-report salaries are a highly non-representative sample.  Moreover, that's only one of the problems with the data.  Another big one is that they only include people who don't have a graduate degree, and who are full-time private-sector employees.  There's a good argument for doing that, but it causes brobdingnagian problems when you're looking at top schools (lots of people who go on to grad school) or military academies (very few graduates in private-sector jobs).

See http://goo.gl/ZRGkfX for Payscale's description of the methodology.

[Roberton3]

What's the methodology of payscale.com? Is it based on people self-reporting their salaries on the payscale.com website?

Yep, and I'm sure that people who self-report salaries are a highly non-representative sample.  Moreover, that's only one of the problems with the data.  Another big one is that they only include people who don't have a graduate degree, and who are full-time private-sector employees.  There's a good argument for doing that, but it causes brobdingnagian problems when you're looking at top schools (lots of people who go on to grad school) or military academies (very few graduates in private-sector jobs).

See http://goo.gl/ZRGkfX for Payscale's description of the methodology.