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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m the pp. I’m bored & quickly found the article I just mentioned. It’s called “Catching up is hard to do: undergraduate prestige, elite graduate programs, and the earnings premium” by Joni Hersch. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, fall 2019. [/quote]

The summary of this paper seems to say it all:

[b]Abstract[/b]
A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can “scrub” a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and earnings among those with elite post-baccalaureate degrees. [b]Few graduates of nonselective institutions earn post-baccalaureate degrees from elite institutions, and even when they do, undergraduate institutional prestige continues to be positively related to earnings overall as well as among those with specific post-baccalaureate degrees including business, law, medicine, and doctoral. Among those who earn a graduate degree from an elite institution, the present value of the earnings advantage to having both an undergraduate and a graduate degree from an elite institution generally greatly exceeds any likely cost advantage from attending a less prestigious undergraduate institution.[/b]

[/quote]

As others have said, correlation and causation are not the same thing. Those who attend an elite undergrad and elite grad school earn more because of who they are, not because of where they went to college.[/quote]

You continue to spew that same argument...but you don't ever cite any 3rd party work that supports your "correlation and causation" argument.

Please, show us the study/analysis.  The study mentioned above is extensive...perhaps you should read the entire study and decide if it supports your position or not.[/quote]

I've read the study. It shows correlation, not causation. Here are the biggest problems:

1) On page 1, the author says there is "extensive evidence of a substantial premium to earning a bachelor’s degree from an elite college or university", and implies she wants to build on this literature. She waits until page 4 to tell us that the evidence in the studies she cites is correlational. Hers is, too.

2) She relegates her discussion of Dale and Krueger to a footnote, where she dismisses it as inconsequential since it focuses on elite colleges like Yale vs. highly selective colleges like Penn State instead of comparing elite colleges to the entire spectrum of other options. Yale vs. Penn State (and other comparisons like it) is the only comparison most people care about, so it's very relevant. And of all the studies she cites, Dale and Krueger gets the closest to showing causation. Plus, many of the other studies weren't even done in the US (irrelevant to us) or were done on much smaller and vastly different population comparisons (flagship universities vs. branch campuses, for instance). It doesn't seem right to cite these as evidence to support your thesis.

Her ominous conclusion implies that if you're admitted to an elite college you'd better go or you'll regret it later, but none of the real world evidence points to that. Look at where the leadership of any company in any field studied. Those with degrees from less selective colleges are represented at least as much as one would expect given that they don't get first crack at many of the most talented high school students. Sure, there are exceptions, but not many.[/quote]

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