Student Turns Down ALL the Ivies and other Elites for.....The University of Alabama! Bama Wins!

[Data10]

Earnings are 45 percent higher for students who graduated from more-selective institutions

Are you comparing similar students at the different colleges… ones like the student in the news story who could have been admitted to ivies but chose to attend elsewhere? Or are you instead finding that the stellar students that ivies tend to admit are often different from less academically inclined students that less selective colleges often admit and as such have very different rates of graduating college, different median earnings, different rates of becoming corporate leaders, etc.?

The research from the study “How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third Decade of Research that annasdad referenced earlier in the thread found quite different results, as quoted below:

We found little evidence to suggest that measures of institutional quality [most commonly defined as selectivity of students] have more than a trivial and statistically significant, direct impact on overall occupational status

The research that HappyAlmumnus referenced at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11/29/does-it-matter-where-you-go-to-college/what-you-do-vs-where-you-go found that students who applied to highly selective colleges and attended elsewhere, like the student in the news story, actually had higher incomes than ones who attended the highly selective colleges:

Researchers found that students who applied to several elite schools but didn’t attend them – either because of rejection or by their own choice – are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools.