A little off target from the OP topic - but germane to the doctor conversation…
Q: What do you call the student with the lowest grades through Med School?
A: Doctor
If you took 100 random Harvard Freshmen and made them go to Ohio State I bet that they would go just as far in life. If you took 100 random OSU students and put them at H I doubt that it would change their trajectories that much either.
The exceptions may be those who aspire to types of work which tend to recruit in a school-elitist way (e.g. management consulting and Wall Street).
There could also be differences based on different levels of cost and debt for each student at each school.
If they are using the Barron’s selectivity ranking, which is often sited as the source for selectivity rankings, the “most competitive” list is definitely a lot broader than the HPYSM or IVY categories that many here immediately assume. In the Barron’s list there are four categories, with the top “most competitive” category containing the usual suspects, as well as schools like Brandeis, CWR, Connecticut College, Holy Cross, Occidental, RPI, URoch, URichmond, TCNJ, and W&M…and many,many more.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/04/business/economy/economix-selectivity-table.html
Which Doctor do I pick? I ask for volume numbers – how many procedures/surgeries have they done, where did they train (not undergrad), what is their readmit rate, and if possible, I try to talk to their nurses. The undergraduate degree is meaningless when it comes to medicine.
Seriously, the only thing I care about is an experienced surgeon’s rate of complications and whether or not they accept my insurance.
“The exceptions may be those who aspire to types of work which tend to recruit in a school-elitist way (e.g. management consulting and Wall Street).”
Yes, this has been repeated ad nauseum on CC. We all get that there are certain fields that recruit most heavily at elite schools. Yawn. The bigger finding is if you excluded those few fields, how similar are they.
Why? I don’t have any links handy but achievement in life is somewhat related to test scores, grades, etc. Harvard only takes kids with the highest scores while OSU covers a far larger score range. If you sample OSU randomly, you’ll get fewer high score students. Now, if you had randomly sampled OSU Honor students then I would agree with you that there probably wouldn’t be significant differences (because you sampled similar populations).
I read the Harvard/OSU statement to be saying what the outcome of the two groups would be going to one school versus the other. 100 random kids at Harvard would have same achievements if they had gone to Ohio State. And 100 random kids at Ohio State would have same achievements if they had gone to Harvard. Not that a random group from OSU would have the same achievements as a random group from Harvard. Maybe I read it wrong though.
As for a heart doctor, I would be headed to the Cleveland Clinic. One of the, if not the, top rated heart medicine hospital in the US/world. Spending a few minutes on their website, they appear to have heart surgeons from many different med schools and undergrad colleges. Idea that I would pick based on undergrad school (or even med school) doesn’t make a lot of sense to me knowing what I know about the practice of medicine. But in reality, I would talk with a couple friends who are docs and ask them for a recommendation.
@droppedit, you’re really missing @snarlatron’s point.
Anyway, the actual education may matter, but as this study doesn’t seem to control for whether kids applied or got in to elites (as other people have noted), it’s actually difficult to ascertain how much is due to increased motivation and how much is due to the school.
BTW, I don’t know why people are talking about doctors on this thread. The MD isn’t an undergraduate degree in the US, so the “health-related majors” referenced in the paper would be BSN’s, etc.
I guess a UPenn/Georgetown(/CWRU/USC) BSN goes far(ther).
Yes, my Harvard/OSU example is trying to point out that there is no magic dust at elite schools causing success in their grads. Schools like Harvard are sorting mechanisms skimming off some of the most interesting, creative, motivated, high-performing kids. These kids are going to be successful wherever they matriculate.
It may help to know what they define as “health related majors”, though. It is certainly possible that students at more and less selective colleges tend to choose different “health related majors”, for example. If and how they count pre-meds (whether successful or unsuccessful) can also affect how this category’s results show up.
Does graduating from a modeling school make you more beautiful?
^ I don’t know about you but it did wonders for me!
Gotcha. I thought you were trying to say that the results for the school would be the same (I’m obviously not Ivy League material! 
OK, so back to being serious:
Another thing is that the factors they try to remove are somewhat limited. Besides not differentiating between whether someone had gotten in to or tried to get in to an elite or not, the factors they try to remove are limited on the top end. For instance, there’s a giant difference between someone who’s in the middle of the top 1% in intellect and someone who’s genius-level (speaking as someone who decidely is not genius-level). Yet there may be little difference in GPA or test scores between the two. And by using average salaries rather than median salaries, the influence of outliers may skew the results.
“Earn more” is so irrelevant, though.
Supreme Court justices earn a fraction of what a competent personal injury lawyer earns. Very few people in the legal profession are going to view someone who is making $2 million per year suing Indian Casino’s when someone falls in the parking lot as an intellectual “peer” of someone on the high court. And there is no doubt that a Supreme Court Justice is more “successful” in virtually every way when compared to the ambulance chasers.
Remind me again why we all (intelligent folks- even when we disagree) want to wade into this debate again?
@Pizzagirl I agree 100% that salary is a poor measure of success, and I am trying to teach my own kids to count family, health, purpose, fulfillment, etc. as more important measures of success. Of course these are harder to graph than a dollar amount, so cash unfortunately becomes the marker of success in studies such as those discussed in this thread.