Originally Posted by passthepotatoes
Originally Posted by Wren
I disagree with one thing you said potatoes. The kids in Davidson Academy are outliers. Just being PG doesn't make you an outlier.

It makes you a statistical outlier. DA has strict admission requirements. Students who are capable of being admitted there are exactly the same sort of students who end up with great college prospects.

Originally Posted by Wren
And I am not sure about outcomes from state colleges and Harvard or Yale. They wouldn't have the endowments they have if their grads had the same outcomes. The endowments are just donations from their alumni..

Of course we know that there is a long legacy of privilege associated with the Ivy League. I'd suggest you take a look at the book The Price of Admission.

I'm not talking about the average graduate of each school. I won't argue that the average graduate of Ohio State and the average graduate of Harvard are likely to make the same amount of money. Rather, that the student who could have been admitted to Harvard but chose to attend Ohio State is likely to have the same outcome. In other words, it isn't something about about attending a college in the Ivy League athletic conference that is changing students into people with top prospects.

I think passthepotatoes is correct that most of the difference in outcomes between Ivy League and public college graduates is due to student characteristics present at matriculation. Some research has found that

Children smart enough to get into elite schools may not need to bother
by ALAN B. KRUEGER
New York Times
April 27, 2000
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/04_27_2000.htm

The working paper version of the article reported above,

Dale, Stacy Berg and Alan B. Krueger. "Estimating The Payoff Of Attending A More Selective College: An Application Of Selection On Observables And Unobservables," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002, v107(4,Nov), 1491-1527.

is at http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409revised.pdf .

An update of the original study, "Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data" is at http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/563.pdf .

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