Theater Careers by Donahue Tim;Patterson Jim;

Author:Donahue, Tim;Patterson, Jim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

The Trouble with Comparing Averages

The troubles with considering average salaries across different fields or undergraduate degrees are many. First, no one sets out to be average. Each young person is encouraged to believe he or she has the stuff to be above average. And often one-half of all people in any given measure are above average. Few people think about the opposite fact: one-half are usually below average. To oversimplify the mathematics of statistics, when the measurements in a sample or a population are evenly distributed, there will be the same number of instances above and below the median, and the median will be virtually identical to the average. There are populations or samples that are not evenly distributed, hence the use of the adverb often.

More important, average results don’t reveal the often significant amounts of variation in a measure. Earlier in this chapter, some average salaries were reported for B.A. degrees in dramatic arts and in business, based on data collected for the National Survey of College Graduates. Business majors on average made a higher salary than dramatic arts majors, $62,853 versus $46,415. No matter how big the difference in average salaries, however, one cannot infer that every business graduate makes more than every drama graduate. Consider fig. 4. More dramatic arts graduates make less than $60,001 per year than do business grads, and the opposite is true, as well: more business graduates make $60,001 or more per year than do dramatic arts graduates. However, the two distributions of salaries overlap significantly. There are dramatic arts graduates who make more than $120,000 per year, and there are business degree holders making $15,000 or less. Whatever the averages say, the outcome for an individual is just that: individual. However, dramatic arts majors should know they start out with a disadvantage to some of their peers with other subject majors.

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