A pretty big chunk of us became entrepreneurs. It's not terribly hard to start a company that's at $100K EBITDA in a couple years and has 50% CAGR up to at least mid 7 figures, so in a decade or so you're doing pretty well...or you sell or get venture funding and own a smaller piece of a much bigger pie. A bunch went into VC and a decent number into other private equity of some sort and they're all well into 7 figures with carry, so if you don't consider them bankers they're pretty much all doing better than the i-bankers. Those who stayed in consulting are probably just a tad under the bankers, not a ton of them still there though. Very few went corporate, but I agree with you that their comp isn't $500K. And a bunch started non-profits or social enterprise companies so they're mostly on the low end of median, although a couple of the social enterprise folks are now running pretty large organizations so they're definitely making over $150K.
To be honest though, I'm imputing a lot of that because I know what everyone is doing and what the average salaries are in those fields for someone at their level. Except for a publicly disclosed exit, comp generally isn't really discussed a lot. And your wife probably has much better data, since I seem to remember that she went to Wharton or Columbia, both of which have both much bigger classes in absolute numbers and a much bigger portion who go into i-banking. I'm talking literally count on one hand sample size for my class who are still in i-banking and not really that many even to start.
