In Getting Into the Ivies – NYTimes.com, which I refer to in a previous post , David Leonhardt refers to a paper by Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale. From that paper Leonhardt concludes that “…there is still scant evidence that the selectivity of the college one attends matters much…” I don’t reach the same conclusion, and commented as follows:
“From my experience as a former professor who taught math at Washington Univ. in St. Louis, I have trouble believing that it doesn’t matter where one attends college – something one might conclude from the work of Dale and Krueger that is cited here. From what I saw at my school, it matters tremendously WHICH highly selective school one attends. So I looked at the paper by Prof. Dale and Krueger. It doesn’t seem to contradict what I have seen. Here is why.
On page 25 of their paper, they write that: “…even though the point-estimates for the return to school quality are close to zero, the upper-bound of the 95 percent confidence intervals for these estimates are sometimes sizeable…” [Italics added] Thus, if one replaces “Penn and Penn State” in the article with say, “Princeton and Washington University” one might find a big difference. According to LinkedIn 6.3% of Princeton’s Comp. Sci. majors work at Google, whereas 1.6% of Washington University’s work there. (Lots of schools can be compared. See the post “Google: Comp. Sci. Grads Who Do Get Jobs There” on my blog inside-higher-ed.com for more data.)
The large differences among highly selective schools occur because some focus on student “wants” (a good experience and a feeling of being smart and learning) and some focus on student “needs” (an education and the attendant self-confidence). It is not true that a school that selects highly, educates highly. I’m sure that, the data show that, too.”
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