<p>On the off-chance that someone here might be interested in data based on juried research, as opposed to opinions based on anecdotal evidence and off-the-cuff “analysis” of flawed data sets that have dominated the thread so far, consider the following, from Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, “How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third Decade of Research.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.</p>
<p>“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.” Studies cited include 1986 follow-up of 1972 graduates; 1994 follow-up of 1985 graduates; and 1974-75 and 1992-93 follow-ups of 1957 graduates. All three studies reported “remarkably consistent results,” and all three “introduced statistical controls for salient confounding influences.”[468]</p>
<p>However, evidence suggests that “attending a selective a selective college enhances occupational attainment in specific professions such as medicine and law. … [one study, after controlling for various factors, showed] the academic selectivity of the college attended had a statistically significant, positive influence on admission to medical school. … [another study showed] attending one of the 74 most selective private colleges in the United States significantly increased one’s likelihood of completing a high-status professional degree (that is, M.D., J.D., M.B.A.). … In both studies the effect is nonlinear and generally accrued only to those students attending the most selective or elite institutions in the country. … Such institutions, at most, educated about 1 or 2 percent of all four-year college students in the national postsecondary system. For the remaining 98 percent or so of all four-year college students, the selectivity of the institution made little or no difference.”[469]</p>
<p>“We found a small body of evidence to suggest that attending a selective college confers a modest advantage on job attainment and career mobility. The evidence, however, is somewhat complex and suggests that college quality may signal an individual’s ability to employers rather than conferring unique skills that make for better job performance. Data from graduates of accounting programs in 82 universities [showed that] measures of institutional quality such as student body selectivity and institutional resources were both significantly and positively related to the number of job offers an individual received from the eight largest and most prestigious accounting-consulting firms in the region. However, after one year on the job, supervisors’ ratings of job performance and promotability were unrelated to institutional resources and actually had a significant, negative association with institutional selectivity.” [469-70]</p>
<p>With regard to earnings, all of the 27 studies reported were based on 11 pre-existing data sets with limitations that “simply do not permit one to introduce controls for all, or even most, of the important confounding influences. Consequently [says one researcher], ‘what looks like an effect of attending an elite college may really be an effect of unmeasured preexisting potential in academic or earning potential.’” [472]</p>
<p>With that important caveat, “although there are some clear exceptions, the weight of the evidence suggests that measures of institutional quality, and particularly student body selectivity, have statistically significant, positive impacts on subsequent earnings. Our best estimate is that, net of other influences … attending a college with a 100-point higher average SAT score (or ACT equivalent) is associated with about 2 to 4 percent higher earnings in later life. … When differential tuition costs are taken into account … the positive effect of attending a selective institution is reduced but does not disappear. … There is also evidence to suggest that the impact on earnings is nonlinear. Only those elite institutions at the very top of the selectivity distribution may have a subsequent impact on earnings.” [473]</p>
<p>“Aside from various measures of institutional selectivity, we uncovered only one institutional quality measure, faculty-student ratio, that was found to have s significant, positive net effect on earnings across individual samples.”[474]</p>
<p>“Measures of individual ambition are almost universally absent in investigations of the impact of college quality on earnings. This absence should probably come as no great surprise, because measuring ambition in a way that predicts one’s future economic success is a nontrivial challenge. … In short, elite, highly selective colleges may simply recruit and enroll students who would have a high earnings capacity no matter where they went to college.” Looking at two independent data sets (1995 followup on 1976 graduates, 1986 followup of 1972 graduates), when one study controlled for ambition by the number of applications students made to selective colleges, both data sets showed “the effect of college selectivity on earnings was reduced to a level that was trivial and nonsignificant.”[475]</p>