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Admissions research
Elite colleges are correlated with high earnings — but is that the school, or the students it admits? The most-cited research on this question offers a clear, and often surprising, answer. Here it is in neutral terms, with sources.
Economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger studied students who were admitted to a similar set of colleges but chose to attend schools of differing selectivity. Comparing students by the colleges they applied to (a proxy for ambition and ability) largely removes the selection bias that inflates simple comparisons.
Once they adjusted for unobserved ability, “our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero.”
In other words, for the typical student, attending a more selective school did not measurably raise later earnings — the raw advantage mostly reflected who attends elite schools.
The null result was not universal. For Black and Hispanic students and students from less-educated families, the estimated returns to selectivity “remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics” — consistent with selective colleges providing networks and opportunities these students might not otherwise access.
We don’t sell prestige. Alongside each school’s selectivity we show its actual net price and median earnings (College Scorecard), and a transparent value figure (earnings ÷ net price) — so you can weigh a school on outcomes and cost, not rank alone. Individual results vary by field and person; treat all figures as estimates.
These outputs are estimates from a baseline model — not guarantees of admission, cost, or outcome.