<p>Annasdad, This is the conclusion drawn on the data you quote so often:</p>
<p>“We uncovered 10 studies based on three independent samples that investigated the impact of college selectivity [defined as average SAT/ACT scored] on various standardized measures of academic achievement. … the weight of evidence from these studies provides little support for the premise that attendance at a selective institution has a consistent and substantial positive influence on how much one learns – at least as measured by standardized tests.” A study of more than 200 four-year institutions, after controlling for precollege variables and in-college experiences (such as major, interaction with faculty and peers, social and academic engagement), then assessing performance on tests including GRE, MCAT, LSAT, National Teachers’ Exam, found “Institutional selectivity … had trivial and statistically nonsignificant effects on the quantitative score.” These results are consistent with studies assessing performance on more broad-based tests such as the College Basic Academic Subjects exam.[Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, “How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third Decade of Research.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005, 76-78, emphasis added]</p>
<p>Said another way, going to an elite college wont result in better standardize test scores. That’s all this data shows. You tend to expand it well beyond what the authors are willing to conclude. </p>
<p>I will rely on payscale.com which conclusively concludes that at least for the average student, the better the school the higher the income. </p>
<p>We can disagree about what is the better data and what is the better measure of an elite school education.</p>
<p>payscale.com would be much more useful if one could stratify the results by school and major instead of school (exclusive-)or major. The mix of majors has a large effect on the pay levels of graduates when looking at entire school averages, so comparing the entire school averages is not very useful.</p>
<p>“As a matter of fact, that’s more or less what Steven Levitt found”</p>
<p>Darn, so instead of spending the money for my kids to go to some of the best private grade/middle/high schools in the country, I could have moved to Detroit and put them in the worst public schools in the country, for the same result.</p>
<p>Instead of having small classes of bright and motivated kids, with outstanding teachers, spending their free period time discussing philosophical questions and scientific advances with their friends…they could have been part of a large crowd, where the teachers spend most of the time just trying to keep order, and they could spend their free period time ducking gang members and smoking weed.</p>
<p>And according to Steve Levitt, they’ve had no educational advantage by doing this. I would have had to suspend rational thought to buy into that one.</p>
<p>“The data is a compilation of multiple studies done over 30 years. I’ve asked repeatedly whether anyone can cite any on-point, contrary data - and been met only with silence, straw men, and ad hominem answers. What’s selective about that”</p>
<p>Maybe your request for data is met with silence because people don’t desire to go searching around the internet to find studies to quote. Or maybe it’s because you block people who are citing the data you request (ie posts 78 and 79).</p>
<p>Is the main point that you are citing merely what jusdafacts specifies, “Said another way, going to an elite college won’t result in better standardized test scores. That’s all this data shows.”</p>
<p>Is that the main point of your data? And do you, “tend to expand it well beyond what the authors are willing to conclude?”</p>
<p>Look, there in the quad! It’s a full professor; it’s a PhD candidate; no, it’s Data Driven Man! Faster acquisition of salient studies than a Cray super computer. Stronger arguments than Johnny Cochrane. Able to dismiss the opinions of hundreds of reasonable, intelligent adults and bring up the straw man rebuttal in a few key strokes! </p>
<p>Anna – our hearts go out to you, girl. Let’s hope for your sake that there are some recent studies suggesting that the people you are attracted to are more fun on dates than that guy at the bookstore who hasn’t washed his hair in a week, that jeans from the Cheryl Ladd collection at KMart aren’t as good as the ones from Lucky and Seven For All Mankind, that despite their serial ineptitude it’s still acceptable to root for the Cubs, that it’s wise to take a pottery class just for fun even if it won’t significantly impact your critical thinking skills and that sometimes it’s OK to go out with friends to a restaurant even though the food is already paid for on your meal plan or you could have made something better and more nutritious on your own for, like, a third the cost.</p>
</a>
Would you mind analyzing these results for us? I read the article, and I question whether this study can be used to reach conclusions relevant to this debate. That said, if forced to use this study as evidence I see the following as the most useful information:</p>
<p>“The results … suggest that strong students at all three schools are unaffected by the SAT scores of their roommates.”
Even if we buy the Payscale methodology, we can conclude nothing of the kind from the data. If you had the chance to take an introductory statistics class when in school, the presence of numerous lurking variables here should be obvious.</p>
<p>Are we to believe that “the average student” at all of the institutions covered by the Payscale survey is identical in terms of academic ability, socioeconomic background, and field of study?</p>
<p>Its a 137 pg chapter entitled: How Increasing College Access
Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It
Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl
I am having trouble linking the pdf. guess its not an option on cc.</p>
<p>We will no doubt hear, if any of this is looked at and responded to, that for “any given individual” they can make the best of a lesser situation, graduate and succeed. But N of 1 reports are ANECDOTAL. Group data is much more powerful and clearly shows the benefits of a more selective school.</p>
Interesting. I don’t have time to read the whole thing right now, but I’ll touch on the more relevant portions:</p>
<p>First, I was still thinking about the issue of peer effects and was interested to find the following
Second, Carnevale & Strohl rely heavily on the idea of differences in resources and spending. However, I have not seen any evidence in that PDF suggesting that spending more produces ‘better’ (I leave the term open to interpretation) outcomes. </p>
<p>If we look at the cited article, the above interpretation appears rather optimistic:
For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to remind everyone of Krueger & Dale’s ultimate finding:
<p>This is a key point. Yes, for the top students, rooming with one who didn’t fare as well on standardized testing did not have a deleterious effect, but the converse was true for those with lower test scores
</p>
<p>and this:
</p>
<p>There is also a large body of literature on the need to improve significantly the 2 year institutions, but that is probably a discussion for another thread.</p>
<p>I haven’t read every post, but am curious about data on GPA instead of SAT. I knowit is a less objective measure, but in my family experiment, SAT’s are similar, but GPA’s are night and day. It seems to me that hard work has at least as much bearing as “smartness”, at least outside of the extremes.</p>
<p>Re peer effects, personally I know I would have had a hard time going to a college where my peers weren’t interested in intellectual / academic pursuits. I found it hugely liberating to go from a high school - where it’s not cool to like school - to a college where it was cool to have academic interests - and that’s really all the internal proof I need. Don’t care what the data says - I think my kids can do better than hanging around average kids. Too bad if that’s snotty in tone.</p>
<p>D1 was going to a recreational ballet school. She was the top dog. I didn’t think she was making much of a progress, so I moved her to a more pre-professional studio. All of a sudden, she was at the bottom of the class. She was very insecure at first, but she started to push herself, took extra classes. She was thrilled when the best dancer gave her a nod on one of her routines. This was just one incident, but without a lot of data, I know my kids tend to perform better when they are not the best in class, they push themselves harder when there are not “better students” in class. Most people do what is necessary to get by, but they will rise up to the occasion when called upon. I have worked at different firms, and I do find myself try harder when I know other people are performing at a higher level. I have also been criticized by my peers when I have performed better than them.</p>
<p>Agree, pizzagirl and oldfort. Some kids from my son’s prep boarding school wound up going to state universities and transferred after a year because it was just too much of a step-down in academic level (including the state U that I attended…). My son said he would have been miserable if he had wound up at a significantly less selective school than he attended. Despite the fact that there are plenty of extremely bright students at these schools who attend for a variety of reasons (economic, etc) it just would not have worked out for my son.</p>