<p>A number of threads on this Board have emerged over the past month asking posters to compare University A at $x vs. College B at $y, and offer a recommendation. Several posters in such threads have written "How can you turn down A, even with $80,000 in loans??? Your career prospects will be so much better from A than from B!. You'll be able to pay that loan back in no time!. You'll be able to get into an Elite (Med, Law, Business, Graduate) school from A without difficulty! Don't dare go to B just to save $80,000! Don't be shortsighted!" Are these sentiments true (it seems so on its face), or merely a popular misconcetion?</p>
<p>In 2002, Krueger-Dale published a paper that concluded that Elite colleges do not have any material effect on the career earnings potential of its admitted students -- that is, students admitted who attended, vs. students admitted who decided instead, for a variety of reasons (financial, relationship, geographic, etc.) to not attend the Elite but instead attend a quality but not elite university (think Public Flagship). The exception to this finding was that low SES students did much better actually attending the elites than the alternative.</p>
<p>The 2002 Krueger-Dale publication (and pre-publications) have been widely discussed. here are a few examples:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/144578-krueger-dale-study-income-graduates-elite-colleges.html?highlight=krueger%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/144578-krueger-dale-study-income-graduates-elite-colleges.html?highlight=krueger</a></li>
<li>Who</a> Needs Harvard? - Brookings Institution</li>
<li>Princeton</a> - in the News - March 29, 2000</li>
</ul>
<p>Given that backdrop, I thought it interesting that his study has been refreshed and expanded, in Working Paper #563 -- and I hadn't read a word about it here on CC. </p>
<p>Here is the new study: <a href="http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/563.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/563.pdf</a></p>
<p>Here is the abstract:</p>
<hr>
<p>February 16, 2011
Abstract
We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C&B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data.
We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents’ education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.</p>
<hr>
<p>The new data and expanded original data and analysis seem to affirm the original findings with greater degree of confidence.</p>
<p>I am not an Industrial Relations guy, nor an economist, nor a sociologist, nor an educational researcher ... yet I find this topic fascinating. My interest is entirely self-serving as a consumer of higher education and an involved parent: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>am I able to fund my child's education at local State U (UCLA in our case, at about $28,000 COA), vs. HYPSM or any other Top 16 or so school, paying full boat? </p></li>
<li><p>Would choosing, freely or b/c of financial constraints, UCLA vs. Dartmouth, as an example, impair our child's financial prospects going forward? </p></li>
<li><p>Does the school transform the student, or merely care-take them for a time? </p></li>
<li><p>Is the choice of University critical to future earnings? </p></li>
</ul>
<p>So many questions. The non-economic questions are not addressed by this study... purely the economic one.</p>
<p>I'm going to print out the new paper and attempt to read it at my daughter's game this afternoon. </p>
<p>Comments?</p>