In the coming weeks, college results will start coming in for a select group of high-school seniors trying to get into the two dozen or so most-selective colleges and universities in the country. Some seniors planning to go to college this fall already have been accepted somewhere, either because they applied early or they chose less-selective schools that get back to applicants almost immediately of their decision. But for those waiting to hear from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and other elite schools, this time of year is one of high angst. By May we’ll hear yet again from those campuses boasting about how they set records for the number of applications they received this year and how middling students they accepted — likely about one out of
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In 1999, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a generally read study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with those of “moderately selective” schools. The latter group was made up of people who had been admitted to a top college but chose to attend another school. The economists established that the earnings of the two groups twenty years after graduation differed little or not at all. A bigger follow-up study, released in 2011 and covering nineteen thousand college graduates, came to a akin conclusion: whether you went to NYU or CCNY, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of income. Other measures, like job contentment and social worth, are more difficult to quantify. In a attentive 2004 essay, the writer Gregg Easterbrook interviewed college officials throughout the country to determine these impacts. His conclusion: on a range of measures of job satisfaction, attendance at a top college had slight …show more content…
Elite schools have more resources and spend two to five times as much on students than open-access schools. They also have much higher graduation rates. High-scoring whites graduate college at a much larger rate (seventy percent) than similarly capable black (twenty-nine percent) or Latino (forty-nine percent) associates. The effects continue into the later generation. Of course having more resources is better but that is not what counts in the long run. What counts is the type of jobs you can get, and how much earnings you would receive from those
In 1999, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a generally read study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with those of “moderately selective” schools. The latter group was made up of people who had been admitted to a top college but chose to attend another school. The economists established that the earnings of the two groups twenty years after graduation differed little or not at all. A bigger follow-up study, released in 2011 and covering nineteen thousand college graduates, came to a akin conclusion: whether you went to NYU or CCNY, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of income. Other measures, like job contentment and social worth, are more difficult to quantify. In a attentive 2004 essay, the writer Gregg Easterbrook interviewed college officials throughout the country to determine these impacts. His conclusion: on a range of measures of job satisfaction, attendance at a top college had slight …show more content…
Elite schools have more resources and spend two to five times as much on students than open-access schools. They also have much higher graduation rates. High-scoring whites graduate college at a much larger rate (seventy percent) than similarly capable black (twenty-nine percent) or Latino (forty-nine percent) associates. The effects continue into the later generation. Of course having more resources is better but that is not what counts in the long run. What counts is the type of jobs you can get, and how much earnings you would receive from those