Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ambition and the college selectivity premium

[Dale and Krueger] focus on the fact that, after controlling for ambition, the premium for attending a school with an average SAT 100 points higher goes from +5.6% to -0.8%. What's truly remarkable, though, is the size of the ambition premium. Applying to schools with an average SAT 100 points higher has a +9.9% premium. Applying to four additional schools has a +9.8% premium. Notice, moreover, that the payoffs for SAT scores and high school GPA only moderately decline after controlling for ambition; Dale-Krueger's measures capture something fairly novel about a young adult's character.

This presumably doesn't mean, of course, that you can greatly increase your income by mailing out lots of Hail Mary applications. Instead, it means that having the ambition to apply to lots of good schools greatly increases income.