<p>Actually, I'm pretty sure the students at Olin are exactly the right applicants for a serious academic education. Isn't it a pretty competitive school?</p>
<p>I donno. But if so, does it depend on their being ""not only able to help others, but willing."? Or is that just the imposition of an additional condition of questionable relevance?</p>
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Or is that just the imposition of an additional condition of questionable relevance?
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Character, as reflected in one's willingness to be of service to others, is a factor in selective college admissions. If you look at the pool of highly selective schools in this country, they could be considered a national resource, although privately operated. I believe that these schools DO look for the quality of a person's character and personality. Those factors do have an influence on the overall ambience of a college. Are you suggesting that admissions should be based on the Academic Index alone? If that's the case, you'll just get a bunch of kids whose only focus in life is test prep -- it's bad enough as it is, I think. Then, how do you differentiate among all those perfect SAT kids? I guess I do value testing and grades as a threshold, but there must be more to selecting students than just numbers.</p>
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NotQuiteOld writes: I don't know why you're debating this in hypotheticals. Krueger and Dale did do a systematic study <a href="http://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/w7322.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/w7322.html</a> and found there is little or no significant income difference over the lifetimes of those who went to an elite school vs those who were also accepted but instead went to a school outside the top 25.
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This study keeps getting mentioned in the press (and on this board) as if it settles the question, but if you dig a little deeper you find it does not. Furthermore it is clear that Krueger buried evidence that opposed his conclusion. I apologize for the length to follow, but its important to understand what the study actual did & found in order to reach a solid judgement. </p>
<p>Krueger starts by assuming each applicant has a quality X and each college has criteria C. If X > C, then admit. However X is composed of 2 parts: x(1) comes from factors such as SAT scores, race, parental income, etc. that can be observed later by researchers. x(2) comes from factors such as motivation, attitude, etc. that are determined thru recs, interviews, essays, etc. x(2) is seen by the colleges but not later researchers.</p>
<p>Next Krueger says the literature typically estimates the effect of college on earnings thru regression to find the constants (J,K,L) in an equation of the form log (income) = J + K<em>avgSAT + L *x(1). avgSAT is the average SAT of the school attended and is used by Krueger as a proxy for college selectivity. Krueger continues by saying that if employers as well as colleges care about X instead of just x(1) then the true equation is log (income) = J + K</em>avgSAT + L <em>x(1) + M</em>x(2) and leaving out x(2) causes the other variables to by overestimated. Most importantly, it will cause K to too high. As Krueger notes in his paper, if both income and admission to schools with higher avg. SATs (eg. more selective) are postively correlated with x(2) then omitting x(2) in the regression will cause K to be overestimated. </p>
<p>The problem Krueger faced in how to get x(2) into the equation, and he can't see it directly any more than anyone else can. So he came up with a very clever approach. Even if he can't see X directly, the colleges presumably did. So students that got into/rejected from the same sets of colleges have very similar values for X. Krueger identified matched students from the data and ran the regression on them. One important complication to be noted is there are thousands of colleges and Krueger wanted to find enough admit/reject matches in his data to make it meaningful. So he assumed that colleges with average SAT scores within a 25 point band were the SAME in selectivity. </p>
<p>When Krueger does his calculations on these matched pairs of students he plugs in the same data everyone else had, but the variables for accept/reject get the weight belonging to x(2). The value of K now tells us how important the college attended really is. In particular, if the value of K turns out to be zero then the college actually attended didn't matter. And this is just what he found.</p>
<p>Now that you have more than the sound-bite press release understanding of what Krueger did, problems should be obvious in this "systematic" study. Even if his approach was clever, what about the assumtions that he used? For one thing, does average SAT score really reflect selectivity? This is crucial, because it is used both to place students into matched pairs and later in the regression equation to stand for selectivity. </p>
<p>For an answer, lets turn to Krueger himself. More specifically, to a draft of his paper you can see on his department's site at <a href="http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf</a> In the draft Krueger noted that other estimates of selectivity existed at that pre-US News time, such as Barron's. Krueger writes "Interestingly, the Barron's ratings do not bear a monotonic relationship with school SAT scores. Notre Dame, for example, is ranked higher in the Barron's ratings than many schools with higher average SAT scores" Even Krueger admits some doubt around the assumption selectivity is captured completely SAT averages. Not only that, but you have to wonder about the assumption that the 25-point SAT bands really put schools into bands of equal selectivity.</p>
<p>So if the assumptions are flawed, what about the conclusions? As they say, GIGO. Furthermore I mentioned that Krueger buried evidence that opposed the sound-bite conclusion. Lets take a look at that.</p>
<p>If you take a look at the draft on the Princeton U website, you can see it mentions a second running of the data. Matched pairs were still created using the 25-point SAT band, but then the regression was run using the Barron's list for the selectivity variables instead of the average SAT score. And what do you know? Krueger found a link between the college attended and income!! He writes an F test of the null hypothesis that the Barron's ratings jointly have no effect on earnings is rejected at the .05 level in the matched applicant model for men". </p>
<p>Curiously enough, this didn't make it into the final report (which you can read at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4lzhk;%5B/url%5D">http://tinyurl.com/4lzhk;</a> the link by NotQuiteOld is just to the abstract). The Barron's regression simply disappeared. It should be kept in mind that Krueger is well known for his populist approach to economics; for example he is also a advocate of raising the minimum wage and claims that raising the minimum wage has no effect on employment of those workers (contrary to virtually all other studies and econ texts). Hence it would not be surprising that he would want to find that pricy elite colleges don't help future earnings.</p>
<p>My take is that the body of research (including Krueger's study) shows there is a significant impact to attending a more selective college. Virtually all other studies have found this effect, and even the pre-publication version of this study acknowledged it and labeled it as "significant". Whether it is the smaller classes, higher expectations of the faculty, just having access to more opportunities by virtue of being surrounded by privileged students, or some other factors, it is impossible to say. But it seems there are economic reasons as well as other more personal reasons to prefer to attend a selective college.</p>
<p>I guess it's just too bad if the hard working, genius nerd who was going to cure cancer has to go to community college because she was too focused to do enough community service in high school. But, gee, those presigeous college alums will at least be nice people.</p>
<p>I would repeal all aptitude tests, teacher recs., community service, sports accomplishments, and a lot else and substitute true achievement tests, on the model that most sensible countries use.</p>
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I guess it's just too bad if the hard working, genius nerd who was going to cure cancer has to go to community college because she was too focused to do enough community service in high school.
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I think this is misguided. A hard-working, genius nerd would find some way outside of the classroom to show this. This kind of kid isn't going to be satisfied with just getting good grades in HS and acing the SAT. The kids I know who've ended up at Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, Columbia, Cornell and Brown etc all excelled inside the classroom. But that world wasn't big enough for them. My older son did very well on all objective measurements of academic ability. But he also did research at a local university, as did many other high achieving kids I know.</p>
<p>Research at a local university seems to fall more into the academic category. What about class vice-president, captain of the volleyball team, founded the school "international relations club" (annual highlight -- visit a Mexican restaurant), worked a zillion hours in a soup kitchen, teachers wrote: "a leader" as factors in admission?</p>
<p>Eulenspiegel, your point seemed to be that community service was the deciding factor between a genius attending Harvard or a community college. I was just pointing out that colleges look for exceptional students -- some are exceptional in their dedication to public service, some to athletics, music, literature. But they are all exceptional in some way. Just because a teacher wrote "a leader" is not enough to gain admission to the most selective schools.</p>
<p>And having said all that above, let me qualify it a bit. I hope this doesn't discourage anyone who can't get into one of the "elite" colleges. </p>
<p>As Stephen Gould (famed scientist who was diagnosed and later died of cancer) wrote, "The median is not the message". Gould at first was discouraged by the short time he was told he had left, then realized the single number didn't really capture reality. See <a href="http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html</a> </p>
<p>You don't get the average income by attending Harvard, or by Cal-State Northridge. Averages are a single number, but the graph of the incomes earned by the graduates of any college forms a distribution. I suspect the range of any college far overlaps the average of even the elite colleges. Your drive, your work, your personal qualities in the end play a much larger role in determining where you end up on that distribution.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting a very interesting critique of the Krueger & Dale paper!</p>
<p>Mikemac, I'm so glad that someone's really looked at that study. I think this is significant, "Hence it would not be surprising that he would want to find that pricy elite colleges don't help future earnings."</p>
<p>Any valid study should just present the data and carefully highlight the assumptions. The researchers should not have any predefined prejudices. I've been uncomfortable when other posters have brought up this paper as the definitive answer to whether or not selective colleges are worth the premium paid for students to attend. Caroline Hoxby has other studies which show the opposite -- that there is a significant difference in earnings by those who attend the most selective colleges, and that there is typically a pretty rapid return on investment. I read her papers, and looked at the Kreuger study, when we were trying to decide where our older son would attend college. We did decide that the more selective school was the better choice and we hope the financial justification works out.</p>
<p>What I meant was that Olin fosters a collaborative environment and attracts students who not only love learning but love helping each other learn, and I think that's crucial. </p>
<p>It was also my answer for how I define the best students. It's a legitimate part of my opinion, with which you may agree or disagree.</p>
<p>And I believe that character is a legitimate part of the definition of "best." In our family, we taught our son from the time he was very young that intelligence without character is nothing short of dangerous. When I taught at the university, I used to have very interesting conversations with grad students concerning the need for ethics courses for students in majors like comp sci for reasons related to that belief. Most interestingly, the suggestion most often came from the student, not from me.</p>
<p>Again, I'm with beck.</p>
<p>mikemac is correct that the study is not definitive and has been challenged. Nonetheless, I think that we can say the following qualitatively, based upon his work as well as the critical work by others: the income differentials are not huge when you correct for as many unobservables as possible, and the effects are strongest when you look at low income students.</p>
<p>In my view, the other problems of the paper are not as important as the issue of using total salaries as the measure of outcome differences from going to top schools. As I emphasized status and rank issues are often the bigger payoffs. [e.g. Getting to be a top law professor vs. high income lawyer in small town.] Further, even the income measures don't correct for cost of living in different cities etc. If the elite grads end up more on the two coasts then factoring in a cost of living difference would deflate their income gains even more. Overall, even the critical studies of Kruger and Dale suggest that even if ALL you care about is money, the differences are not as big as you might think. The real gains are to networking and access and these are greatest for the poorest.</p>
<p>That's why it's important to treat these studies not as guides to some platonic ideal formula but rather as qualitative evidence of what is significant and in what direction. And for all their problems, they are an improvement on personal anecdotes about who did well and went to which school. I was objecting to the constant back and forth on those grounds which you always see on CC.</p>
<p>One final point re: character. I see this debated all the time. I don't doubt that true character does matter. But I have seen no direct evidence that admissions officers are especially good at picking this out. And I think that the myriad complicated rules that have been created are often self-servingly supported on "character" grounds. I'd like to see more transparency on this and at least some semblance of statistical evidence that their "character" criteria do more good than harm on average.</p>
<p>makes some very good points, especially on the matter of cost of living.</p>
<p>I am intrigued. Can one say that a high cost of living is actually one form of consumption, so that, in effect, one earns a higher income, and lives in a high cost area because it is actually worth it? At least in the US, if may be argued that cities like San Francisco, New York and Boston cost so much because, well, for many people, the high taxes and high prices come with benefits, such as superior cultural environments (so the high taxes go to subsidize the artists that make such environments possible).</p>
<p>This is purely hypothetical; maybe someone can prove or disprove it with actual data. If this is true, however, then one should not factor out the cost of living from one's total income when trying to compare one's true financial well-being.</p>
<p>But yes, financial well-being is not the only measure of success, that's for sure.</p>
<p>4th floor</p>
<p>Absolutely. That's a complicated issue and leads some to argue that you should never correct for cost-of-living in the extreme. A reasonable position would be it's somewhere in the middle. Figuring out exactly which part is consumption and which cost of living is left to complicated econometrics and to what assumptions you want to make about heterogeneity of individual preferences (i.e. which models of human behavior and choice you want to invoke). I am with Prof. Deirdre McCloskey on this -- all these econometric exercises are mostly qualitative calibrations at best. They're not the equivalent of lab experiments.</p>
<p>Take them with a grain of salt, but do not be foolish and ignore them.</p>
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I guess it's just too bad if the hard working, genius nerd who was going to cure cancer has to go to community college because she was too focused to do enough community service in high school. But, gee, those presigeous college alums will at least be nice people.
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I doubt that many hard working geniuses are going to community colleges, unless it's by choice. These are exactly the kind of kids that routinely get into our best state univerisities; Michigan, CAL and UCLA etc., and it's usually because they want to be there. The engineering and science opportunities are great for these kids at our best state Us.
"Geniuses" also get picked up by the Cal Techs and MITs -
In my eight years of following college admissions and noting what kids from our school go where, I have yet to see an extremely bright person NOT go to an exceptionally good school, even if they don't have any significant ECs or community service on their resume.</p>
<p>I've mentioned my best friend's son before on this board, who was admitted early - (only a hundred or so a year) to Yale the same year my D was admitted. They were agressively pursuing this boy, yet he had no sports, no community service - no non-academic ECs at all! His extracurriculars consisted of math contests and academic decathalon.
He was (is) a brilliant math student with a lot of promise - that's it. He's also fairly quiet as well, so "personality" was not a factor in their decision.
He was also in at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, full-ride at local Cal State.
Apparently his lack of "giving back" didn't bother these schools - they figured he'd give back in his productive post-grad years.</p>
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Well my mother always told me it is who you know that counts not what you know.
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<p>Actually, even who you know is of little value if you're not competent or aren't the kind of person they want to do business with. Relationships do matter, though, for the opposite reasons.</p>
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<p>Would she have married Gore?</p>