The college hustle

I went to college right after high school and graduated four years later. My freshman year, I attended Vanderbilt University. While I competed on their varsity cross country team, my academic record that year was poor. Without going into detail, suffice to say that during my entire four years in college, my cumulative GPA never went down. After that, I transferred to UT-Knoxville.

There are a variety of reasons to choose one college or university over another. But the lifetime income of a white private school grad is barely distinguishable from a white public school grad, on average, and certainly doesn't compensate for the disparity in tuition. There are data suggesting that Black and Latinx do benefit from the networking at elite private schools.

"In 2002, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with graduates of schools that were less selective. After controlling for student characteristics like SAT scores, they found that the earnings boost from having attended an elite school was “indistinguishable from zero.”

"In other words, according to Krueger and Dale’s research, if two students, Maria and Jill, have the same SAT scores, and Maria goes to a highly selective college while Jill is rejected and goes to a less selective university, their earnings will still be the same.

"In 2011, there was a follow-up study on Krueger and Dale’s research that looked at administrative earnings data from students who’d graduated in 1989. Job incomes were again largely unaffected by whether students went to selective schools like Tulane University, the University of Pennsylvania, Williams College or Yale University. The researchers did find, however, that there was a noticeable salary boost down the line for Black and Latinx students who’d attended highly selective institutions. The researchers suggest this was because those schools provided networks to these students that white or well-schooled families may have already had."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/college-decision-career-salary-lie_l_62696038e4b03e3f5a17e328