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Do Highly Selective Colleges Increase Students’ Long-Term Earnings?

March 2, 2011, 2:42 pm

Two researchers have updated a groundbreaking study that found that attending a highly selective college did not make much difference in a student’s average earnings after college. The new study—by Stacy Dale, a senior researcher with Mathematica Policy Research, and Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University—looks at the group of people in the original study over a longer period of time and also considers a second, more recent cohort. The results? The same finding: no appreciable financial payoff for attending the most-selective colleges. For example, the average SAT score at the most-selective college that rejected a student was actually a better predictor of long-term earnings than the average score at the college that the student ultimately attended. A notable exception: Black and Hispanic students and those with parents with less than 16 years of education (essentially, less than a bachelor’s degree) did appear to get an earnings boost from attending a highly selective college.

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  • 11167997

    What’s remarkable about this study, as it was about the authors’ 2002 study, is the complete absence of two common sense earnings-impact variables: (a) whether the student earned one or more graduate degrees (and which ones), and (b) student major. These should strike any responsible researcher of this topic as material at least for discussion, and, if one chooses to ignore them in statistical models, to have the decency to tell readers why. If Berg and Kreuger determine that some other variable(s) are proxies for graduate degrees and major, or subsume graduate degrees and major, then they should at least tell us so and justify their decision. Otherwise, there is something funny going on here, and however interesting the rest of the analysis and its methodology, it’s not worthy of consideration.

  • arrive2__net

    SAT score was a better predictor than attendance at a highly selective college for the general population, so a cohort of graduates from of a highly selective college may seem to be making more money, but only where the SAT-level in not statistically controlled. If everyone who attends a college is brilliant (as measured by SAT), the resulting high pay scales can seem to be a function of the college, but it is actually a function of the brilliance (as measured by SAT). So apparently if you are a brilliant student (defined by SAT score), then attending a less selective college will not necessarily hold you back in income.

    It seems to me that therefore workplace and career achievement and competition are likely to be a bigger factor in determining long term income than college selectivity. The highly selective colleges will have a curtailment of range in SAT scores, maybe if their students had a greater range of SAT scores the selective-college boost would then be obvious, but since the colleges are highly selective there are no such students.

    Since Black and Hispanic students do get a selective-college boost, it would seem that the highly-selective college stamp of approval may open doors for them that a regular college degree can’t.

    Bernard Schuster
    Arrive2.net
    Twitter.com/arrive2_net

  • old nassau’67

    Observations:
    1. A control group is impossible, since the same students could not also attend “less selective” colleges, and then be compared to their selves who went to “highly selective ones.
    2. “highly selective” means, in part, selecting students not out to maximize their future earnings.
    3. As George Will notes today in the Washington Globe, “This academic year (2011), 16 percent of Princeton’s seniors and 18 percent of Harvard’s applied to join Teach for America….two-thirds stay in teaching”. Teaching = choosing one way to lower the average alum’s income.

  • rickman

    I sometimes use my iPod touch or iPad for presenting. But like many others I find a small notebook more reliable for taking lots of detailed notes. To avoid the problem of losing the notes, I scan them using my ScanSnap.

  • nacrandell

    “Law-school deans and professors, meeting in New York this weekend for the Future Ed 3 conference, invoked software and distance learning as tools that can rescue legal education from classroom doldrums…”

    Isn’t that nice, developing an entertaining software system for the classroom that will reduce the cost of law school for the few and increase enrollment at a time when big firms have laid off attorneys, implemented pay freezes or reductions, and reduced hiring.

    This has little to do with legal education ad more to do with ‘selling’ degress. Not all law schools are $50,000.00 per year and where would the online apps lead to – online doctors? Call me a traditionalist, but, I prefer my doctors to have attended school in the Caribbean Islands.

  • austinbarry

    I can remember visiting Project Pericles at Harvard Law School which was working on an expert system for routine legal processing. One other thing I remember were a Dragons Lair type video-disk simulation of a trial (where the student/player had to object to testimony and give a reason). This was in 1986 (back when “word processing” was relatively new). I guess technology doesn’t advance at the same speed in all fields.

  • jabberwocky12

    I’m all in favor of online learning; I just hope that this “rescue” is not aimed at merely increasing student numbers and thereby save tons of cash. The idea being that it makes no material difference whether you have 100 students or 1,000 students or even 10,000 on a course – just develop the course notes and distribute them electronically, and call it education.

    Where that has been attempted, it has usually resulted in “canned” courses broadcasting information, with an idea of filling the pitchers with information to be vomited back out at the end of the semester.

    The aim should be education, not financial saving to make up for shortfalls resulting from other bad business decisions.

  • http://hiresteve.com/ Steve Foerster

    Awareness of how far behind law schools are in online education doesn’t really matter when the ABA is hellbent on ensuring that they never accredit a JD offered by distance learning.

  • xmckeon

    @jabberwocky12 – I don’t think they’re necessarily looking to create online courses, there are great opportunities to bring technology into the classroom as an aid to further enhance the experience. Working at a law school, while attending graduate school, I’ve noticed how much less technology is integrated into the classroom in law schools. There’s great potential to engage students online as well as offline, without initially requiring online participation, the students will inevitably migrate online for discussion, while bringing topics and arguments back to the classroom (as one example).

  • http://twitter.com/robonQSB Rob Woyzbun QSB

    crevier makes a great point below – quality of engagers (plural) and content linked to imagination, creativity and actually caring about your program / school / career / industry etc. makes a difference.

    In my other life I’m involved with clients who are either “testing” social media or have built out strategies. Our leaning? Those that place social media in a “department” or outsource – have less success than those who integrate into everything they do.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=840842367 Eric Goldstein

    I agree that the more engaged the entire organization is, the more successful the social marketing program will be. And I agree that you don’t want to stifle creativity.

    However, I disagree that there should not be any type of guidelines or thought about how to make that happen. This is particularly true in organizations like Insurance, Banking, and even higher end / retail. Look what happened to GM recently when a sloppy Tweet was posted. Stupid, but ugly.

    Educating people on how to use the social media, having tools in place to view your network, and people in place to monitor it (even if the whole organization is encouraged to use the system) is the right way to go.

  • http://twitter.com/tbrock111 Travis

    I agree, many colleges and universities are hindered by adequate staffing. I agree with Eric that the more involved the college is as a whole, the more involved the central marketing will be in using social networking. However, there are some fundamental shifts in staffing that can take place to increase your chances of having a successful social media effort and for some reason, they are mentioned a whole lot in social media circles. Here is a blog on how to fix the issue of inadequate staffing: http://talk.emgonline.com/Blog/Pages/Notebook/Brand-Manager-s-Notebook/April-2011/Who-s-Driving-the-Social-Media-Bus-

  • http://www.edumorphology.com mpstaton

    The typical social media tools are generic, rather than specific to education.  What higher education needs are great apps that are designed to meet their needs, rather than additional staffing to continue to promote generic communications mediums.  

    Having said that, it’s not a zero-sum game.  The more you’re out there and the more you use, the more “results” you’ll get no matter how you count them.  

  • opentosuggestion

    Yuppie University?  Moral relativism?  Was this rant written in the eighties?

  • jeff_winger

    Why two women in power? Why not Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh?

  • drj50

    While these reported stories are sad, especially for the victims, we do need a little perspective. Current charges concern two coaches — out of how many nationwide? And, of course, we have so far heard only one side. (Remember Duke lacrosse, anyone?) It is easy, without offering evidence, to opine that these stories are both true and exemplary of things that permeate higher education. Are there lots of problems? Sure. Are these small number of stories indicative of major trends? I doubt it.

  • pianiste

    The issue is not how many coaches in Division I sports are child molesters (and at Penn State, where there are many, many coaches, only one is accused of molesting children), but, should the accusations against Jerry Sandusky prove valid,* the coverup.

    The Penn State coverup involves the winningest Division I football coach of all time, who had a 46-tenure as head coach at Penn State and was arguably the most powerful man on campus,** the president of Penn State, a vice-president at Penn State, the athletic director at Penn State, and an assistant coach who apparently witnessed the rape of a child and didn’t call 911.

    Why was there a coverup? Because football is so big at Penn State: an alleged $70 million profit last year (the largest in the U.S.), 100,000+ fans in the stadium for every home game, membership in the Big Ten with its additional TV revenue and better bowl prospects, etc. Nobody wanted to be the whistleblower against all that, especially the football coach and the athletic director, who’d be blowing the whistle on themselves.

    Division I football, whose relevance to university’s mission is tenuous at best and destructive at worst, enjoys similar powers at most all universities with prominent football programs. Malfeasances other than sexual ones–e.g., grade-fixing, criminal behavior by players, academically unqualified recruits, and (at least in my opinion) the outrageous salaries paid to football coaches (Urban Meyer, the new coach at Ohio State will get $4 million a year)–are rife at Division I football schools. Whistleblowers are fired, intimidated, and blacklisted.

    This is why the Penn State scandal is not merely a matter of “out of how many [coaches] nationwide?,” but of a revelation as to just how corrupting the inordinate and academically inappropriate power of Division I football is to the universities who participate in it.

    * The charges against Sandusky–the product of a long grand jury investigation, whose stomach-turning report is publicly available in full–appear pretty formidable.

    ** President Spanier wanted Joe Paterno out in 2004. Unable to fire a man with much more power on campus than he had, Spanier had to ask Paterno to retire, and was summarily rebuffed.

  • manhire
  • drj50

    It has not been established that there was a coverup. Again, we have only heard one side of all this. If grand juries established guilt, there would be no need of a trial.

    I can easily understand that those who reported the one incident to the vp who oversaw campus police (both Paterno and the asst. did so according to published reports) may have thought that they fulfilled their legal AND moral duty. I sure would have thought that had I been in their shoes. And, no, there is no obligation on the part of one reporting to see what action was taken. (You don’t call the district attorney to find out what happened to the kids who sprayed graffiti on your neighbors house. You report it and let the authorities deal with it.) The offense, according to published reports, seems to be with the vp, not with the athletics staff.

  • 12080243

    The commenters just below are either not working at a college or university or they are ignoring what’s going on on their own campuses. I’m in contact with colleagues at universities across the country and their experiences are similar to mine at The University of Southern Mississippi. See, http://www.usmnews.net. It’s also instructive to read authors like Benjamin Ginsberg, “The Fall of The Faculty.”

    By the way, our stories at usmnews are well documented. We support our news with USM’s own documents which administrators reluctantly give up through freedom of information requests.

    Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA, Professor, School of Accountancy, University of Southern Mississippi 

  • Guest

    Remember the history of pogroms, witch hunts, and brownshirts. There is another side to all these stories which we haven’t heard yet. I refrain from condemning when later facts might surface which could exonerate people we assume are guilty and/or reveal the true problem to lie where we don’t see it. Beware hysteria, especially in ourselves.

  • 11144703

    I cut and paste the titles I found on Wikipedia.  I see that those titles I found were vandalized versions and that they have been corrected, and of course prostko is correct. You can find the vandalized titles at the history of the page at 29 Nov. 2011.  That vandalism was corrected today, 1 Dec. 

    ‘beth, I regret that I copied such repugnant information.  prostko, thanks for the correction.  

  • satris

    ” … while most colleges have about 25 percent of their students enrolled in the sciences, UMBC boasts 41 percent of its students earning bachelor’s degrees in this area. At UMBC, students consider being smart to be cool, and they thrive while participating in hands-on, relevant experiences.”  What does the percentage of students in the sciences have to do with whether students consider being smart to be cool?  

    The sentence should have been:  At UMBC, students consider doing science to be cool ….

    I’m sure that at many colleges students perceive nonscientific majors to be cool, and widely participate in those fields.  In many cases, I suppose, it is possible to find very smart students in these nonscientific majors,     

  • 609zr

    Have Katehi and Lozano been fired yet?

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