A recent article
Why Your Clients’ Children Probably Won’t Benefit From an Ivy League Education by Lynn O'Shaughnessy
wealthmanagement.com
January 24, 2019
surveys some research, including the paper
Elite Schools and Opting-In: Effects of College Selectivity on Career and Family Outcomes Suqin Ge, Elliott Isaac, Amalia Miller
NBER Working Paper No. 25315
Issued in November 2018
NBER Program(s):, Labor Studies
Abstract:
Using College and Beyond data and a variant on Dale and Krueger's (2002) matched-applicant approach, this paper revisits the question of how attending an elite college affects later-life outcomes. We expand the scope along two dimensions: we do not restrict the sample to full-time full-year workers and we examine labor force participation, human capital, and family formation. For men, our findings echo those in Dale and Krueger (2002): controlling for selection eliminates the positive relationship between college selectivity and earnings. We also find no significant effects on men's educational or family outcomes. The results are quite different for women: we find effects on both career and family outcomes. Attending a school with a 100-point higher average SAT score increases women's probability of advanced degree attainment by 5 percentage points and earnings by 14 percent, while reducing their likelihood of marriage by 4 percentage points. The effect of college selectivity on own earnings is significantly larger for married than for single women. Among married women, selective college attendance significantly increases spousal education.
