PayScale.com's Salary Madness Pits Duke versus Cornell for NCAA Basketball Championship

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) March 17, 2009 -- If the 2009 March Madness Men's NCAA Tournament scores were determined by typical graduate salary, Duke University would defeat Cornell University in the Championship Game. PayScale, Inc., the world's largest real time salary dataset, today unveiled its Second Annual Salary Madness in conjunction with the 2009 March Madness/NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament.

PayScale analyzed the March Madness brackets by typical salaries of graduates from each participating institution. All salary data used in the 2009 PayScale Salary Madness is from the company's 16.5 million plus real-time salary dataset.

2009 Salary Madness (http://www.payscale.com/2009-march-madness-predictions) highlights include:

• In looking at the relationship between NCAA seed and Median pay, we observe that seed increases with Graduates' pay, but not as strongly as last year. Last year, pay increased by about $4000 per seed, while this year it increases by about $1000 per seed.

• Cornell and USC are underachievers in the sense that they are one seeds in PayScale's rankings, but are only ranked 14 and 10 respectively according to the NCAA rankings.

• Louisville and Pittsburgh are overachievers as they are only seeded 13 and 10 by PayScale, but are number one seeds according to the NCAA.

"Every year March brings the excitement of college basketball to a fever pitch throughout the country. At PayScale, we are always interested in viewing national events through the lens of salary and compensation," said Dr. Al Lee, Director of Qualitative Analytics of PayScale. "This year's tournament might result in a double win for one school: Salary leader and perennial basketball powerhouse Duke University playing through to the Final Four and possible National Champion."

Last year's 2008 PayScale Salary Madness (http://www.payscale.com/2008-march-madness-predictions.htm) bracket can be found here: http://www.payscale.com/2008-march-madness-predictions.htm

Every day tens of thousands of people take PayScale's salary survey to compare their pay anonymously with their peers and improve their understanding of the job market. PayScale has created the concept of anonymously comparing your salary online - in detail - to other real people with similar individual and job characteristics (e.g., location, company type and size, job, experience, education, skills, and more.) Using an advanced search and proprietary matching technology, PayScale finds a relevant peer group from their data set that matches the user-provided job information. The system allows every user's job profile to be unique and relevant to his/her different job requirements. This creates a level of accuracy that cannot be achieved with traditional methodologies and allows individuals to better understand earning potential

About PayScale

PayScale.com (www.payscale.com) is the world's largest ongoing salary survey. With the world's largest database of individual employee compensation profiles, PayScale provides an immediate and precise snapshot of current market salaries to employees and employers. PayScale's patent-pending real-time profiling technology collects and indexes employee pay attributes worldwide and makes this compensation data (http://www.payscale.com/hr/default) available through its online salary tools (http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Country=United_States/Salary) and salary benchmarking reports. PayScale was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington USA.

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