<p>From Harvard Schmarvard – </p>
<p>…The most important reason graduates of the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons had bigger salaries later in life was not because they had so many talented classmates at their selective alma maters but because of personal characteristics they brought with them to college – habits and tendencies that had developed long before they started calculating their grade point averages.</p>
<p>The two researchers studied 14,239 students at thirty colleges, ranging from the most selective, including Yale and Swarthmore, to much less picky schools like Denison and Penn State. They noted which schools had accepted and rejected which students, and they compared their subsequent earnings.</p>
<pre><code>Then they devised a strategy to implicitly adjust for students’ crucial “unobserved characteristics,” such as persistence, humor, and warmth, that might have influenced success, both in the admission game and in life…The researchers concluded, “Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges.”
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