<p>All this basically means, all else being equal, prestige matters. It could matter very little in careers such as medicine to mattering a whole lot is financial careers such as investment banking.</p>
<p>There have been several studies discussed here at length that showed no significant difference in average earnings for equal ability students attending different tier schools. If you have been paying attention here you would have known that. The exception was minority students who got a boost.</p>
<p>Again, no evidence has shown that attending an elite university is detrimental to a students success. However, even studies that support your thesis point to some negative side effects(e.g lower graduation rate) of attending less prestigious universities.</p>
<p>It’s a big jump from great advantage to doing no harm. I never would say going to and elite does actual harm. I still don’t understand that second sentence very clearly. Even modestly elite U’s like Wisconsin have about 80% grad rates so how can more elite schools be 4 times better. I think the writer mangled that one. Now maybe the meant that at A you have a 5% chance of not graduating and at B it is 20% so it is 4 times more likely you don’t graduate, in a sense.</p>
<p>Like barrons, I’m confused by that second sentence, as well. I interpret that first sentence to mean that graduation rates from elite colleges are 1.06x those of grad rates from non-elite colleges. The second sentence seems to mean that equivalent students at the less selective colleges have a graduation rate 1/4 that of the students at the elite institutions. </p>
<p>To try to figure out what was going on, I went and looked at the paper itself, rather than the UM article. The first thing I learned is that I really need to learn more statistics. Maybe some knowledgeable person could go and take a look at Table/Figure 4 in the paper?</p>
<p>One interesting bit that wasn’t in the posted summary: “These results indicate that it matters who is obtaining an elite college education. While an elite college education may matter little in terms of career effects for those who actually attend an elite school, other college attendees with a lower propensity to attend may have benefited considerably had they attended an elite school.”</p>
<p>The authors return to this point at the very end of the paper: “Are there students, however, for which an elite college education would actually result in socioeconomic gains? We find that while students that actually attended elite schools would likely do just as well across their careers had they attended non-elite schools, randomly selected college attendees may have reaped significant rewards had they attended elite schools. This finding poses an interesting implication for the process of social stratification in American society.”</p>
<p>If I’m reading this correctly, it means that the biggest gain to individual students came when those who were least likely to attend an elite school (with likelihood being a combination of various socioeconomic factors) attended elite schools. Hoo boy! Imagine what fun someone could have dropping this little nugget in the Ivy forums. </p>
<p>It’s also interesting to read the summary of previous research on this subject. The results are mixed: sometimes the advantage goes to the elites, sometimes not. Researchers keep trying different methods of studying the issue. I imagine it’s hard to do a thorough longitudinal study on the topic when the environment of college admissions keeps changing. Certainly male graduates from Wisconsin in 1957 matriculating to college faced a very different admissions environment than that same group in 2008.</p>
<p>In risk analysis, it is prudent to take heed of the doubt. Like in the case above, the results are mixed, indicating doubt on one side. For simplicity,say that half agrees that going to elite schools matter and half doesn’t. We can interpret this as a 50% chance of attending an elite school mattering. In this case, attending an elite school can or can not help. Thus, its better to go to the elite school because one can only benefit( the article said nothing bad about attending them.). On the other hand, attending a non-elite school yields only one possibility; equal results. => No benefits. In light of this, its better to attend a elite school when affordable. The only downside to this is that the money invested in top schools may not yield any significant returns. But I like to think of it as a risk investment. Like crashing a car, the air bag may or may not save your life. And certainly the chances of actually using the airbag are much less than 50% for each driving session. Yet we still pay for more expensive cars with this feature.</p>
<p>If a family has a low EFC, the choice is more like:</p>
<p>Elite school = the same as other schools, or maybe a benefit?
Public school = the same as most other schools, maybe worse than elites? + $200,000</p>
<p>You naively call potentially wasted money of a huge amount a “risk investment”. I don’t think you understand how much money that is to some families, and the level of sacrifice some people have to deal with for something that “may not yield any significant returns.” </p>
<p>If you’re rich or have great scholarships, then yes that is a reasonable decision. For everyone else, it’s more complicated than that.</p>
<p>Your “air bag” analogy is a terrible one: does a car with an airbag cost perhaps one hundred thousand dollars more than one without? That’s ridiculously understating the problem. You might as well argue, “Some people say snack products made with whole wheat are healthier than ones made with refined grains - yet we choose to spend money on those anyway. Clearly, you should pay for the most expensive/elite college possible!”</p>
<p>Hmm, someone needs a statistics course even more than I do! ;)</p>
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<p>When I mentioned that the results of the various studies were mixed, I meant mixed, not a 50/50 split. In fact, of the quoted studies, far more concluded that attending an elite school made little or no difference. It is bad form to make assumptions about the results when it is so easy to go and read the original paper yourself. That’s the way it’s done at elite schools, after all :)</p>
<p>The studies themselves vary in terms of their initial assumptions, their methodology, and their samples. You need to keep all of this in mind when considering what the results of the studies in aggregate are saying. You cannot treat this like some sort of random sample, where each researcher’s results are of equal weight. Certainly you can’t extrapolate and say that the percentage split between study results is the same as the probability that elite school attendance “matters”. </p>
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<p>The benefit is money saved. This might mean that the student has far less debt, or that the parents have far less debt, or that the parents have an improved standard of living, which I’m personally all in favor of It also means that resources (that is, money) are freed up for other opportunities for the student: grad/professional school, seed money to start a business, assistance with buying a first home, support if the student needs to/wants to take an unpaid internship or significant travel as a pathway to a desired career, etc etc etc. </p>
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<p>No we don’t: all us parents who love our kids are paying less than $10k for a car! </p>
<p>I do know that I regard a safe car with airbags as far, far, far more important than attending an elite school. Ditto health insurance. I suspect that most parents would agree. 20-somethings, though, don’t necessarily see things this way; you don’t generally see them taking on debt for boring risk assessments like this.</p>
<p>There was a study done in 2005 by the National Center for Educational Statistics based on 2001-02 data which showed an average difference in net cost after grants between in-state publics and top private universities of roughly $15K per year. I think that is probably a good figure to use when talking about the additional cost of attending an elite private college.</p>
<p>Mentions of $200K and $100K are probably way out of line.</p>
<p>So, that would be about $60K over 4 years. I think that difference would be offset (in terms of dollars) if the student earned an additional $2-3 thousand per year by attending the elite private school.</p>
<p>Again, that ignores the intangible benefits of attending a substantially better school.</p>
<p>But you must take into account that students who are admitted into the top private universities will almost always be eligible for substantial merit scholarships from their in-state schools, so it does not make sense to compare average grants from in-state schools to average grants from top privates.</p>
<p>college help: In our specific situation, the excellent in-state flagship COA for engineering was $28,866. Our state school does not give many or substantial merit scholarships. Our S got no FA and $1K per year in merit aid, which would take the COA down to $27,866. The COA for Stanford was $52,390. That’s $98K more over 4 years for Stanford. And our state school is a very expensive one. </p>
<p>However, we received FA from Stanford under their new enhancements, so the cost will actually be a bit smaller than the state school. So I think that the differences are either (1) lots bigger than your estimate if your family DOESN’T get FA or (2) lots smaller if your child attends a top school with new FA enhancements and your family DOES get FA.</p>
<p>@Slithey Tove. I’ve made the assumption of a 50/50 split to only justify my stance that even if the split is tilted towards those positing that the college attended doesn’t matter, its still a risk averse decision as I’ve have shown with my my car analogy. Look at it this way, the chances of crashing are less than 1% and yet we pay. But the truth is even if the split is tilled against me,the chances of going to a prestigious school with a pay off relative to other less prestigious schools are much much more than 1%(because if it weren’t, then the opinion is a near consensus, which it isn’t, b/c it would be something worth noting such that they would put it in the article.) Hence, its less risky. Therefore I can say that it justifies the difference in price. The difference may be more than a car with a air bag vs a car without in relative terms, but the chances of a prestigious school paying off is also more.</p>
Maybe some knowledgeable person could go and take a look at Table/Figure 4 in the paper?</p>
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