<p>For students accepted to one of the schools mentioned here there is little evidence that the school has much impact on what one does. Accordingly, perhaps those that have an inkling toward the academic life choose certain schools, rather than the academy influencing them. </p>
<p>UChicago's Andrw Abbott who looked into these things has written:</p>
<p>...those who graduated from Chicago in 1975a group considerably less privileged by ancestry than yourselvesand can tell you that their median personal income is about five times the national median, and their median household income is at about the 93rd percentile of the nations income distribution. Thats where you are headed. As far as the nationwide success game is concerned, theres no reason for you to study here. The game is over. Youve already won.</p>
<p>Surely, you tell me, my studies at Chicago will determine whether Im in the 94th or the 99th percentile of income. Getting a fine higher education may not affect my gross chances of worldly success but surely they affect my detailed ones.</p>
<p>On the contrary. Theres no real evidence in favor of this second reason to get an education and a good deal of evidence against it. All serious studies show that while college-level factors like prestige and selectivity have some independent effect on later income, most variation in income happens within collegesthat is, between the graduates of a given college. That internal variation is produced by individual factors like talent, resources, performance, and major. But even those factors do not determine much about your future income. For example, the best nationwide figures I have seen suggest that a one-full-point increment in college GPAfrom 2.8 to 3.8, for exampleis worth about an additional 9 percent in income four years after college. Thats not much result for a huge amount of work.</p>
<p>The one college experience variable that does have some connection with later worldly success is major. But most of that effect comes through the connection between major and occupation. The real variable driving worldly success, the one that shapes income more than anything else, is occupation.</p>
<p>Within the narrow range of occupation and achievement that we have at the University, there is no strong relation between what you study and your occupation. Here is some data on a 10 percent random sample of Chicago alumni from the last 20 years. Take the mathematics concentrators: 20 percent software development and support, 14 percent college professors, 10 percent in banking and finance, 7 percent secondary or elementary teachers, and 7 percent in nonacademic research; the rest are scattered. All the science concentrations lead to professorships and nonacademic research. And biology and chemistry often lead to medicine. But there are many diversions from those pathways. A biology concentrator is now a writer, another is now a musician. Two mathematicians are lawyers, and a physics concentrator is a psychotherapist.</p>
<p>Take the social sciences. Economics concentratorsthis is today identified as the most careerist majorare 24 percent in banking and finance, 15 percent in business consulting, 14 percent lawyers, 10 percent in business administration or sales, 7 percent in computers, and the other 30 percent scattered. Historians are often lawyers (24 percent) and secondary teachers (15 percent), but the other 60 percent are all over the map. Psychologists, surprisingly, are also about 20 percent in the various business occupations, 11 percent lawyers, and 10 percent professors; the rest are scattered. And there are the usual unusuals: the sociology major who is an actuary, the two psychologists in government administration, the political science concentrator now in computers.</p>
<p>As for the humanities, the English majors have scattered to the four winds: 11 percent to elementary and secondary teaching, 10 percent to business occupations, 9 percent to communications, 9 percent to lawyering, 5 percent to advertising. Of the philosophers, 30 percent are lawyers and 18 percent software people. Two English majors are artists and one is an architect. A philosophy major is a farmer and two are doctors.</p>
<p>With the exception of those planning to become professors in the natural sciences, there is no career that is ruled out for any undergraduate major. You are free to make whatever worldly or otherworldly occupational choice you want once you leave, and you do not sacrifice any possibilities because you majored in something that seems irrelevant to that choice. There is no national evidence that level of performance in college has more than a minor effect on later things like income. And in my alumni data, there is no correlation between GPA at Chicago and current income...</p>
<p>...The long and the short of it is that there is no instrumental reason to get an education, to study in your courses, or to pick a concentration and lose yourself in it. It wont get you anything you wont get anyway or get some other way. So forget everything you ever thought about all these instrumental reasons for getting an education. The reason for getting an education is that it is better to be educated than not to be.</p>
<p>The reason for getting an education hereor anywhere elseis that it is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something. Not because it is a means to some other end. It is better because it is better. Indeed this statement implies that the phrase aims of education is nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no aim other than itself.</p>
<p><a href="http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml</a></p>
<p>(Which I think is what attracts kids to Chicago [and elsewhere] and results on some sticking with it for a lifetime.)</p>