

Graduates of elite colleges don't make more money - boomzilla
http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/563.pdf

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sabj
This title is a little bit misleading...

A more relevant question is not whether graduates of certain school do or do
not make more, but rather, what causes them to do so. And analysis of students
who were admitted to such elite schools, but chose to matriculate elsewhere,
shows that on the basis of income alone they had very similar success
outcomes. Only for very-lower-income students was there a noticeable advantage
to attending the elite school, where this metric is concerned.

Thus, the important factor is the "type of student," not the "type of school."
This is borne out in their conclusions as well:

"Consistent with the past literature, we find a positive and significant
effect of the return to college selectivity during a student’s prime working
years in regression models that do not adjust for unobserved student quality
for cohorts that entered college in 1976 and 1989 using administrative
earnings data from the SSA’s Detailed Earnings Records. Based on these same
regression specifications, we also find that the return to selectivity
increases over the course of a student’s career. However, after we adjust for
unobserved student characteristics, the return to college selectivity falls
dramatically. For the 1976 cohort, the return to school-SAT score for the full
sample is always indistinguishable from zero when we control for the average
SAT score of the colleges that students applied to in order to control for
omitted student variables."

Furthermore, I would importantly mention that while these studies are
valuable, they do ignore significant changes in the nature of student bodies,
labor markets, and educational institutions since the original cohorts are
first observed; their findings can't fairly be 100% extrapolated onto current
populations.

I could go more into the weeds here, but I think it is not ultimately
necessary. Interesting paper, I think less exciting than the works it cites in
its introduction, but still quite neat.

TL;DR = Schools don't matter; students do.

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tedunangst
"First, the analysis does not pertain to a nationally representative sample of
schools, as the sample is derived from the 27 colleges and universities in the
C&B dataset, the majority of which are very selective."

The schools are listed in footnotes on pages 8 and 9, and the ones that don't
qualify as "elite" aren't exactly shabby either.

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cskau
Maybe it's just me, but that font is really bad. And the huge line spacing
isn't helping either.

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Ben_Dean
but they do have more satisfying sex lives.

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orijing
Did anyone else find it ironic that it was published by someone at Princeton?

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lachyg
How is it ironic?

