<p>thank you spideygirl!</p>
<p>SAKKY and BIGBROTHER1984 - I thought this additional information might help:</p>
<p>"To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.</p>
<p>As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between, Krueger said. One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But lets look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesnt seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they dont.</p>
<p>Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person youll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. Youll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn youre good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. I can see why families are really concerned about this, Krueger went on. The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. Thats an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.</p>