<p>I choose to go to the affordable school, but not a so called famous school.</p>
<p>I don't understand your point on the anti-ivy sentiment. If they don't care about the Ivies, then why bother apply to them, get rejected; then resent the people that did get in? I'm not saying that it is the Ivies that exclusively provide a fine education. I'm just saying that historically, the Ivy League schools have and still do provide an outstanding academic environment, and people recognize that. It was very easy for my friends to land jobs on wall street, because the best companies take a ton of the ivy graduates every year. Of course, they take excellent candidates from other schools as well, but I know as a fact that the percentages are a lot lower. I can't say what is the best choice for everyone, but I think if you can get into an ivy or other fine institutions like MIT and Stanford, then you will get a quality education, and for the majority, it will pay off when you graduate.</p>
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[quote]
Certainly, the academic research on this (see Kruger and Dale, or Hoxby, for example) shows no or a small effect on earnings.
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<p>Uh, first off, I think you actually meant to say Krueger & Dale, not Kruger & Dale. And, more precisely, it's actually *Dale & Krueger<a href="Stacy%20Dale%20is%20first%20author">/i</a>. </p>
<p>Secondly, and far more importantly, the only metric that D&K use to assess college "quality" is the SAT score, yet I think we all know that the top colleges - and the Ivies especially - do not admit students solely on SAT scores. Later research has demonstrated that a more proper analysis that utilizes a multi-factor regression analysis demonstrates that prior studies significantly underestimated the relationship between college quality (properly measured) and future wages. See Black & Smith (2006) as an example of this stream of research.</p>
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[quote]
Regarding the value of the "network", whether during school or afterwards, again, there is little evidence that shows value in this.
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<p>Well, I'm not highly familiar with the social networks literature per se<a href="for%20it's%20never%20particularly%20interested%20me">/i</a>. But the value of social capital, the role of social networks in building social capital, and the translation of social capital into higher wages and better job opportunities has been clearly shown within the literature *in general, so, simply from a theoretical standpoint, I don't see why it wouldn't also hold from the standpoint of social networks formed within college settings. Perhaps more importantly, I am not aware of any academic literature that shows that college social networks don't translate into greater future earnings, and that would indeed be an interesting counterintuitive result that you would think somebody would want to discover, if, for no other reason, such a counterintuitive result, if proven, would be sure to at least land somebody a strong tenure-track position, and might (along with other accompanying works) actually be good enough to actually secure tenure.</p>
<p>Sakky, </p>
<p>Thank you for the correction of the cite for Dale and Krueger. I was pleased with myself for even remembering the author's names, as it has been quite some time since I read the paper. :) Besides, unlike you, I don't have a professional interest in this area.</p>
<p>Regarding the value of social networks, perhaps the reason you don't see much in the literature comparing elite college social networks to the social networks of more humble institutions is because there is no difference in the value of either? To put it another way, some folks would posit that an elite college social network is more valuable than others. This is what has not been shown. And since negative results rarely get published (they only get presented in internal seminars, as you should have seen by now...), if folks had looked at this question and found no difference, then it would be hard to find a record. And, a null result is usually not so hot for getting tenure either...</p>
<p>What about UC Berkeley? Would any of you recommend going there for undergrad business (intended) for an OOS student? You would have to factor in the OOS tuition of 42k or so per year, plus the likelihood that the student would not get into Haas. Or even be able to major in economics.</p>
<p>I was trying to make that decision two years ago, and I obviously decided against UCB. It's too late for me to regret anything, but apparently UCB was the dream school of my high school graduating class (or at the very, very least one of the top dream schools).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Regarding the value of social networks, perhaps the reason you don't see much in the literature comparing elite college social networks to the social networks of more humble institutions is because there is no difference in the value of either? To put it another way, some folks would posit that an elite college social network is more valuable than others. This is what has not been shown. And since negative results rarely get published (they only get presented in internal seminars, as you should have seen by now...), if folks had looked at this question and found no difference, then it would be hard to find a record. And, a null result is usually not so hot for getting tenure either...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, I strongly disagree, for this null result is highly counterintuitive and would therefore attract immense academic interest, if actually proven true. After all, such a result would fly in the face of the existing theoretical paradigms that have been constructed regarding social networks. </p>
<p>Let me give you an example. Let's say I was to publish a paper that rigorously proved that smoking actually doesn't damage your health. That would surely start a firestorm of controversy for it would countermand 50 years of public health and epidemiology research, but if I actually rigorously demonstrated that my results were correct, I would instantly become one of the hottest new scientists in the world. I might even be tenured immediately just on that one paper alone. That's how important such a paper would be because it would serve to completely invalidate conventional wisdom. The notion that college social networks do not behave the same way that regular social networks behave, while not being as important as showing that smoking is not actually dangerous, would likewise be an extraordinarily interesting anomaly of accepted theory. One would then ask what exactly makes college social networks different from other social networks and this might spawn an entire subfield that spans public policy, education, sociology, and labor economics. I would therefore contend that researchers would be highly highly incentivized to find such a discovery, if it in fact existed. Yet I am not aware of anybody that has done so. {Although I can certainly ask the social networking researchers whether they know of any.}</p>
<p>Sakky, </p>
<p>I understand where you are coming from, but there are a few problems with your argument.</p>
<p>First, one cannot in any way "prove" that smoking does not cause a problem, just as one cannot "prove" any negative. This is both a philosophical and a practical issue, as the absence of an effect NEVER proves that the effect does not exist. Philosophers and philosophy of science have discussed this for a long time. Rather, what scientists do in practice is posit an explanation, then try to design experiments to refute it. To put it another way, the "right" answer is the only one left standing in light of the experimental results. And if someone can come up with an alternate explanation consistent with the data, then the researchers have more work to do: designing experiments to distinguish between the two hypotheses. At least this is how the natural sciences work. So in this social structure, experiments that don't show an effect are often considered failures and don't get published or even discussed much. </p>
<p>The fact that my null hypotheses is counterintuitive does not mean a whole lot. In fact, let me turn your argument around. If one hypothesized thatelite college social networks were in fact more valuable than the more humble ones, then this should be rather easy to test. So the publications should be easy to find. If in fact such publications can't be found, then that means that no one found the effect with statistical significance, no?</p>
<p>So, since you are much closer to this literature than I, a humble former biologist who fell from grace and entered the business world, maybe you can look for some cites that show the situation with college social networks one way or another. If you find publicly available cites, so much the better. Alas, I no longer have free online access to every journal imaginable like I did a few years ago.</p>