<p>Here's an excerpt:</p>
<p>Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, has studied the issue and questions the validity of this. "Students who attend more selective colleges," he wrote in 2000, "are likely to have higher earnings regardless of where they attend college for the very reasons that they were admitted to the more selective colleges in the first place." In other words, intelligence, like cream, will rise to the top. But definitely go to college, he stresses; that's "more important than where you go."</p>
<p>That's not to say it isn't important to go to a decent college, but in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly last year titled "Who Needs Harvard?" Gregg Easterbrook (Colorado College, class of 1976) argued that "any of a wide range of colleges can equip its graduates for success." Part of his reasoning is that there has been a "profusion of able faculty members" but only a finite number of top schools for them to funnel into. As a result, the pretty good schools "have gotten much better, while the great schools have remained more or less the same," narrowing the quality gap considerably.</p>
<p>And if the goal is graduate school, Mr. Easterbrook asserts, the elite schools are no longer the "exclusive gatekeepers," as more and more schools feed students into advanced study, even at top graduate schools.</p>
<p>Mr. Krueger, a product of the Ivy League, asked recently for his latest thinking on the value of elite schools, reiterated his skepticism about blindly going for the "name" school. "I think it is very wrong," he said, "to advise students to automatically go to the most selective or elite school that accepts them, without regard to the match between the particular student's interests and personality and the school's strengths and weaknesses."</p>
<p>Loved the illustrative cartoon too!</p>