Reply to Alabama for free or a more elite school that is less than free-ride?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Alabama for free or a more elite school that is less than free-ride?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are many empirical studies on the value of an elite school and I would urge you to look at them rather than rely on people's perceptions here.  In general, they pay off over the course of a lifetime pretty substantially.  Alabama is not a top tier public university -- it is a good state school for Alabama residents and I suspect somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90% of the students are from Alabama and stay in Alabama (you can find that data easily enough).  There are always exceptions, and doing well there may propel one to a decent or excellent grad school but in general, you should be playing averages rather than hoping your child is the exception.  I also think you should listen to those who have stories about students who lasted a short time.  Alabama is very Southern, and I would think most students from MD or No. Va. might have a tough time there; again, not everyone and you know your child best but this seems like a highly risky choice, especially if aid might be in the wings at a more desirable school.  Personally I would do pretty much everything I could to ensure my child did not have to make this choice. [/quote]

Perhaps you should look at those studies a bit more closely yourself. One of the best designed and most well-known studies of the value of an elite education actually concluded that it conveys relatively little value--except for certain specific types of students: minorities, low-income, and children whose parents didn't go to college. Here's a nice summary of the study (which was conducted by two Ivy alums):

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/?_r=0

As the author of this article notes, it would be nice, though, if we could measure the value of careers by something other than earnings.[/quote]

Just have to add this quote from the NYT article: The study found that:

"A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn." Note that the student APPLIED to Penn. Didn't matter if he/she was accepted. Once they controlled for where students applied, the difference in earnings between students who graduated from elite colleges and those who graduated from others in the study (which, BTW, included Tulane) disappeared.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics