As I recall, haven’t we linked and discussed before studies showing that lifetime earnings of those who turned down Ivies for top-but-cheaper schools were comparable to those who went? By that standard, prestige is inefficient. (And I’ve seen advice to this effect, too, in college guide materials.)
I have also heard that an increasingly common strategy among undergraduates in California is to go to one of the feeder community colleges and only go to the prestigious schools like UCLA or Berkeley for the last 2 years. (Although I read this in Steve Sailer who was busy mixing it up with his theories about canny Asian parents maximizing the bang for their buck, so reader beware.)
These 3 points suggest to me that it is known that prestige is not identical to quality. There are a few possible explanations that occur to me.
Perhaps the target demographics of the 3 points are people who cannot take advantage of the financial aid offered by prestigious universities but perhaps not by the higher-quality but less prestigious institutions. (Prestige attracts donations, which enables things like Harvard’s attend-free-if-you’re-poor. Obviously qualified poor kids will much prefer Harvard to, say, Cornell, even if Cornell is more quality; it’s basic math. But for a middle-class kid who doesn’t qualify?)
Perhaps the lifetime earnings are similar or higher elsewhere but one is compensated for the poorer education/higher-expense with intangibles like being part of a tradition, everyone knowing of where you went, or...
Having more power thanks to the prestigious institution & networking. I think of John Kerry; leaving aside the marrying-into-wealth, he has exercised a great deal of power of the years, so you certainly couldn’t call him a failure, but I suspect his lifetime earnings are vastly less than if he had gone to a higher-quality-but-lesser-prestige school which funneled him into private law. (Kerry first really got into politics at Yale, but if you don’t think his example works, how about Barack Obama? Without the prestige of Harvard, would he have gone into local politics/community-organizing & thereby forfeiting the lucrative lawyering career one could expect? But notice how much power he got in exchange.)
So that’s 3 or 4 ways in which prestige could be very closely aligned to quality and yet remain permanently different.
As I recall, haven’t we linked and discussed before studies showing that lifetime earnings of those who turned down Ivies for top-but-cheaper schools were comparable to those who went? By that standard, prestige is inefficient.
NO! they said the opposite! They said that school SAT scores don’t predict income, but they also say that the cost of the school, even among private schools, predicts income. In recent cohorts, it was only a normal return on investment, but it was positive.
The final version also makes, if only by omission of the previous version, the claim that school prestige doesn’t predict income. This is facially absurd and very hard to reconcile with the tuition effect.
Actual research on the subject is scant, and what exists offers conflicting evidence. One often-cited study from 1998, however, concludes that attending a more selective or elite institution does not translate to an economic advantage for students later on, as measured by their reported income. Attending a more elite college does seem to affect the later incomes of poorer students. The study, written by Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, and Stacy Berg Dale, then a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, concluded that the qualities that students themselves bring to their education may be what matters most.
Are you looking at the actual studies or something?
Oddly, I was just reading How to Lie with Statistics the other day, and, well …
One often-cited study from 1998, however, concludes that attending a more selective or elite institution does not translate to an economic advantage for students later on, as measured by their reported income.
… these data might be very poor, for several reasons.
Self-reporting is unlikely to be accurate—people both overstate and understate income for various reasons.
The surveys can only go out to people that can be tracked down—and those who cannot will be disproportionately the poorly-off.
If the response rate is not close to 100%, there may be a strong difference between those who reply and those who do not.
These are just the three effects I can remember that apply to a study of just this kind.
But how do those skew the result? It’s not enough to say that there’s bias; you would have to show that the bias works against the claimed conclusion. So with respect to your points:
1) If you don’t have a reason to believe the bias skews one way or the other, knowledge that it could be higher or lower doesn’t matter.
2) The wealthier you are, the easier you are to track down, so the survey would tend to over-state the average income.
3) True, but again, do you have a reason to believe it goes one way rather than the other? (I admit I will never understand what kind of person actually responds to surveys. For people in my demographic, responding to a pollster is a mark of shame, and my parents, less reliant on cell phones, refuse to answer pollsters as well.)
That’s essentially what I said—networking is part of quality; lifetime earnings are part of quality; all that added together is approximated by prestige, and there’s little evidence that any of those metrics alone is better quality estimator than prestige alone.
I don’t think I said what you said. I think quality is different from lifetime earnings, which is different from prestige/networking.
Quality in science can easily depress lifetime earnings (do the most brilliant scientists work in academia or for commercial interests? Where do they earn more), for example, and I already pointed out how prestige/networking can push down lifetime earnings because it offers a chance at power and power doesn’t always come with as much money as one would have elsewise.
These are all in general correlated, much like IQ is correlated with success, health, non-criminality etc. but no one would say that IQ is a better metric to use than measures just of health or non-criminality.
As I recall, haven’t we linked and discussed before studies showing that lifetime earnings of those who turned down Ivies for top-but-cheaper schools were comparable to those who went? By that standard, prestige is inefficient. (And I’ve seen advice to this effect, too, in college guide materials.)
I have also heard that an increasingly common strategy among undergraduates in California is to go to one of the feeder community colleges and only go to the prestigious schools like UCLA or Berkeley for the last 2 years. (Although I read this in Steve Sailer who was busy mixing it up with his theories about canny Asian parents maximizing the bang for their buck, so reader beware.)
These 3 points suggest to me that it is known that prestige is not identical to quality. There are a few possible explanations that occur to me.
Perhaps the target demographics of the 3 points are people who cannot take advantage of the financial aid offered by prestigious universities but perhaps not by the higher-quality but less prestigious institutions. (Prestige attracts donations, which enables things like Harvard’s attend-free-if-you’re-poor. Obviously qualified poor kids will much prefer Harvard to, say, Cornell, even if Cornell is more quality; it’s basic math. But for a middle-class kid who doesn’t qualify?)
Perhaps the lifetime earnings are similar or higher elsewhere but one is compensated for the poorer education/higher-expense with intangibles like being part of a tradition, everyone knowing of where you went, or...
Having more power thanks to the prestigious institution & networking. I think of John Kerry; leaving aside the marrying-into-wealth, he has exercised a great deal of power of the years, so you certainly couldn’t call him a failure, but I suspect his lifetime earnings are vastly less than if he had gone to a higher-quality-but-lesser-prestige school which funneled him into private law. (Kerry first really got into politics at Yale, but if you don’t think his example works, how about Barack Obama? Without the prestige of Harvard, would he have gone into local politics/community-organizing & thereby forfeiting the lucrative lawyering career one could expect? But notice how much power he got in exchange.)
So that’s 3 or 4 ways in which prestige could be very closely aligned to quality and yet remain permanently different.
NO! they said the opposite! They said that school SAT scores don’t predict income, but they also say that the cost of the school, even among private schools, predicts income. In recent cohorts, it was only a normal return on investment, but it was positive.
The final version also makes, if only by omission of the previous version, the claim that school prestige doesn’t predict income. This is facially absurd and very hard to reconcile with the tuition effect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/business/19money.html doesn’t seem to mention anything about SAT or cost of school correlating with income:
Are you looking at the actual studies or something?
Oddly, I was just reading How to Lie with Statistics the other day, and, well …
… these data might be very poor, for several reasons.
Self-reporting is unlikely to be accurate—people both overstate and understate income for various reasons.
The surveys can only go out to people that can be tracked down—and those who cannot will be disproportionately the poorly-off.
If the response rate is not close to 100%, there may be a strong difference between those who reply and those who do not.
These are just the three effects I can remember that apply to a study of just this kind.
But how do those skew the result? It’s not enough to say that there’s bias; you would have to show that the bias works against the claimed conclusion. So with respect to your points:
1) If you don’t have a reason to believe the bias skews one way or the other, knowledge that it could be higher or lower doesn’t matter.
2) The wealthier you are, the easier you are to track down, so the survey would tend to over-state the average income.
3) True, but again, do you have a reason to believe it goes one way rather than the other? (I admit I will never understand what kind of person actually responds to surveys. For people in my demographic, responding to a pollster is a mark of shame, and my parents, less reliant on cell phones, refuse to answer pollsters as well.)
If you have reason to believe that there are significant sources of sample bias in a poll, you will have to discount the results severely.
Yes.
That’s essentially what I said—networking is part of quality; lifetime earnings are part of quality; all that added together is approximated by prestige, and there’s little evidence that any of those metrics alone is better quality estimator than prestige alone.
I don’t think I said what you said. I think quality is different from lifetime earnings, which is different from prestige/networking.
Quality in science can easily depress lifetime earnings (do the most brilliant scientists work in academia or for commercial interests? Where do they earn more), for example, and I already pointed out how prestige/networking can push down lifetime earnings because it offers a chance at power and power doesn’t always come with as much money as one would have elsewise.
These are all in general correlated, much like IQ is correlated with success, health, non-criminality etc. but no one would say that IQ is a better metric to use than measures just of health or non-criminality.