It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is “15 years from now, is it really going to matter that much what you did in high school to get into college?” AFAICT, academics are not that strongly related to long term career success, and that in the longer term, traits like conscientiousness and skills like working with others end up being more important. I wouldn’t recommend to my child that they try to signal their worthiness to colleges and universities at the expense of actually acquiring skills.
Then again, I speak as someone in a field (nursing) where it really doesn’t matter where you did your schooling; nobody cares. I get the impression that there are fields where it matters a bit more (like engineering) and fields where it might matter a lot more (like business, where most of the value of a prestigious college is in networking and building human capital anyway).
One thing that’s unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.
As for how and how much undergraduate institution attended impacts life outcomes, I’ll be writing about the subject at great length in the future, but in response to your reaction that it doesn’t matter, for now, consider the following:
According to a survey of 1.2 million graduates of US colleges, the median mid-career incomes of colleges are $137k – $120k (#1-#5), $120k — $108k (#6 – #20), and $108k – $99k (#21 – #50). There’s an obvious confounding factor of ability bias, but correlation is still evidence of some degree of causation.
If you’re going into academia, the status of the professors who write your graduate school admissions recommendation is higher if you go to a more prestigious school.
Anecdotally, finance and management consulting firms recruit disproportionately from Harvard, Yale and Princeton
If Sergei Brin and Larry Page hadn’t gone to Stanford CS graduate school, they may not have met and may not have started Google. Similarly, if Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t gone to Harvard undergraduate, he may not have had as strong programmer friends to start Facebook with (and conversely, the early employees of Facebook wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with him).
One thing that’s unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.
It’s possible that I misread, but I interpreted Swimmer963′s point as saying exactly this—it really doesn’t matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you’re aiming to get into. If this is what she meant, I probably agree—I don’t think there is any one-semester high school course which can’t be entirely learnt by a reasonably bright student in about 1 week of dedicated personal study.
it really doesn’t matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you’re aiming to get into.
That’s a bit my point, but not entirely. I think that 10 or 20 years later, the specifics of what high schoolers did will almost never matter. (General high school work ethic and direction/ambition in life likely does matter, if only because it will correlate, in most people, with adult work ethic and ambition). To a lesser degree, 10 or 20 years down the road, it probably doesn’t matter whether a student got into their top choice or second-or-third choice college. College admissions depend on a lot of random factors, like whether you were sick on the day of a high school exam worth 40% of your grade, and more time passing flattens out this randomness. Students with good work ethic and a strong direction in life will probably end up where they want to be anyway, once 10-20 years have passed. Students who don’t really know what they want to do still won’t know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college. Good work ethic and ambition is correlated with getting into prestigious colleges, but I would argue that there’s less causation there than this article seems to imply.
This is just my impression, though, and I’m generally not that ambitious. It might be different for people at higher level of driven-ness and/or with different, more academic-based goals.
Vaniver: I said “it surprises me how much...” because I expect to agree with most LW posts, and I’m slightly surprised every time I don’t agree. It’s a good surprise.
Students who don’t really know what they want to do still won’t know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college.
I’m really not sure that’s the case. It seems to me that people who attend prestigious colleges are likely to be exposed to a broader range of interests and opportunities than they otherwise would, giving them more of a chance of finding something that they want to do.
I guess I don’t have a big enough example set to know. Anyone know of studies done on this that try to separate variables like conscientiousness/work ethic and ambition from actual college attendance? (Given that there’s an expectation, in the US anyway, that smart, hardworking, ambitious kids will go to prestigious colleges and the rest won’t.)
How about this as a counter-example? This guy essentially got into Harvard because of one accident with a plagiarised essay when he was a kid (at least, that’s the way he tells his story), and is now a member of faculty at Chicago. I think life outcomes might be more path-dependent than we like to admit.
The second half of his story has a fair amount of detail, and implies very strongly that he was conspicuously intelligent and the first high school he was at wasn’t all that bad for students.
Unfortunately, the transcript includes that his wife thinks he has a secret to happiness by controlling his attitude towards events, but doesn’t go into detail.
It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is X
Generally, when I say “it surprises me that I think X” that happens because I thought I thought ~X, which generally happens because I used to think ~X.
Social science studies are often unreliable, and specifically, often verify a claim for a single population, and then unwarrantedly conclude that the claim holds for all populations. This isn’t physics :P
Mostly Caplan, other papers (here’s two studies with commentary), and a prior determined mostly by a broader version of hereditarianism (seeing most of a person’s ‘quality’ as fixed by reaching adulthood, so a combination of biological and early environmental effects). Just IQ is apparently 40%, add in Conscientiousness and it’s likely to cross 50%, and now we’re in the territory where it’s mostly ability bias.
Now, so long as the treatment effect is positive there’s an argument for going to an elite school, but since elite schools are expensive (both in cash and in signalling to get there) the treatment effect needs to be above some threshold to be worthwhile, and I haven’t run the numbers to figure out where I think that threshold is.
Mostly Caplan, other papers (here’s’s two studies with commentary), and a prior determined mostly by a broader version of hereditarianism (seeing most of a person’s ‘quality’ as fixed by reaching adulthood, so a combination of biological and early environmental effects). Just IQ is apparently 40%, add in Conscientiousness and it’s likely to cross 50%, and now we’re in the territory where it’s mostly ability bias.
Perhaps this is implicit in what you say, but signaling and social networking benefits from going to an Ivy League may play major roles independently of human capital.
Perhaps this is implicit in what you say, but signaling and social networking benefits from going to an Ivy League may play major roles independently of human capital.
I try to use the phrase “treatment effect” to encompass both capital improvements and social networking, “sheepskin effect” to encompass signalling, and “selection effect” to encompass ability bias. It seems to me that social capital (i.e. knowing other people and them knowing you) could be wrapped into human capital directly without much loss.
It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is “15 years from now, is it really going to matter that much what you did in high school to get into college?” AFAICT, academics are not that strongly related to long term career success, and that in the longer term, traits like conscientiousness and skills like working with others end up being more important. I wouldn’t recommend to my child that they try to signal their worthiness to colleges and universities at the expense of actually acquiring skills.
I was nodding along here until the last sentence. What you did in high school will usually cease to be relevant after some time, while the signalling value of a sufficiently prestigious college remains. You can usually make up missed learning opportunities from high school, such as the molecular biology course given in the example, whereas the window where your activities will be relevant to college placement is much narrower.
For a sufficiently conscientious student, the value of high school may be primarily what it gives them the opportunity to signal, rather than what it gives the opportunity to learn, aside perhaps from lessons of a social rather than academic sort.
As JonahSinick notes, many high school students and their parents believe this both by stated and revealed preference, and I think they are correct although the magnitude of the effect is hard to pin down. If nothing else, however, if you greatly surpass the academic standards of a college, they will give you merit scholarships in order to get you to pick their college, and the amounts here can be very large especially if the alternative was being forced to borrow money at interest! Thus, signaling is at a minimum a paying job.
It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is “15 years from now, is it really going to matter that much what you did in high school to get into college?” AFAICT, academics are not that strongly related to long term career success, and that in the longer term, traits like conscientiousness and skills like working with others end up being more important. I wouldn’t recommend to my child that they try to signal their worthiness to colleges and universities at the expense of actually acquiring skills.
Then again, I speak as someone in a field (nursing) where it really doesn’t matter where you did your schooling; nobody cares. I get the impression that there are fields where it matters a bit more (like engineering) and fields where it might matter a lot more (like business, where most of the value of a prestigious college is in networking and building human capital anyway).
One thing that’s unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.
As for how and how much undergraduate institution attended impacts life outcomes, I’ll be writing about the subject at great length in the future, but in response to your reaction that it doesn’t matter, for now, consider the following:
According to a survey of 1.2 million graduates of US colleges, the median mid-career incomes of colleges are $137k – $120k (#1-#5), $120k — $108k (#6 – #20), and $108k – $99k (#21 – #50). There’s an obvious confounding factor of ability bias, but correlation is still evidence of some degree of causation.
If you’re going into academia, the status of the professors who write your graduate school admissions recommendation is higher if you go to a more prestigious school.
Anecdotally, finance and management consulting firms recruit disproportionately from Harvard, Yale and Princeton
If Sergei Brin and Larry Page hadn’t gone to Stanford CS graduate school, they may not have met and may not have started Google. Similarly, if Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t gone to Harvard undergraduate, he may not have had as strong programmer friends to start Facebook with (and conversely, the early employees of Facebook wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with him).
It might be, but you can’t just say this—you need to justify a model under which this is true.
More on hiring practices at finance & management consulting firms.
It’s possible that I misread, but I interpreted Swimmer963′s point as saying exactly this—it really doesn’t matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you’re aiming to get into. If this is what she meant, I probably agree—I don’t think there is any one-semester high school course which can’t be entirely learnt by a reasonably bright student in about 1 week of dedicated personal study.
That’s a bit my point, but not entirely. I think that 10 or 20 years later, the specifics of what high schoolers did will almost never matter. (General high school work ethic and direction/ambition in life likely does matter, if only because it will correlate, in most people, with adult work ethic and ambition). To a lesser degree, 10 or 20 years down the road, it probably doesn’t matter whether a student got into their top choice or second-or-third choice college. College admissions depend on a lot of random factors, like whether you were sick on the day of a high school exam worth 40% of your grade, and more time passing flattens out this randomness. Students with good work ethic and a strong direction in life will probably end up where they want to be anyway, once 10-20 years have passed. Students who don’t really know what they want to do still won’t know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college. Good work ethic and ambition is correlated with getting into prestigious colleges, but I would argue that there’s less causation there than this article seems to imply.
This is just my impression, though, and I’m generally not that ambitious. It might be different for people at higher level of driven-ness and/or with different, more academic-based goals.
Vaniver: I said “it surprises me how much...” because I expect to agree with most LW posts, and I’m slightly surprised every time I don’t agree. It’s a good surprise.
I’m really not sure that’s the case. It seems to me that people who attend prestigious colleges are likely to be exposed to a broader range of interests and opportunities than they otherwise would, giving them more of a chance of finding something that they want to do.
I guess I don’t have a big enough example set to know. Anyone know of studies done on this that try to separate variables like conscientiousness/work ethic and ambition from actual college attendance? (Given that there’s an expectation, in the US anyway, that smart, hardworking, ambitious kids will go to prestigious colleges and the rest won’t.)
How about this as a counter-example? This guy essentially got into Harvard because of one accident with a plagiarised essay when he was a kid (at least, that’s the way he tells his story), and is now a member of faculty at Chicago. I think life outcomes might be more path-dependent than we like to admit.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/504/how-i-got-into-college
The second half of his story has a fair amount of detail, and implies very strongly that he was conspicuously intelligent and the first high school he was at wasn’t all that bad for students.
Unfortunately, the transcript includes that his wife thinks he has a secret to happiness by controlling his attitude towards events, but doesn’t go into detail.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/504/transcript
Can you say where your impression comes from?
I got some of that from the start:
Generally, when I say “it surprises me that I think X” that happens because I thought I thought ~X, which generally happens because I used to think ~X.
My impression is that it’s mostly ability bias, and there’s several studies to that effect. (My flight is about to board, or I’d look some up.)
Where does your impression comes from?
Social science studies are often unreliable, and specifically, often verify a claim for a single population, and then unwarrantedly conclude that the claim holds for all populations. This isn’t physics :P
Mostly Caplan, other papers (here’s two studies with commentary), and a prior determined mostly by a broader version of hereditarianism (seeing most of a person’s ‘quality’ as fixed by reaching adulthood, so a combination of biological and early environmental effects). Just IQ is apparently 40%, add in Conscientiousness and it’s likely to cross 50%, and now we’re in the territory where it’s mostly ability bias.
Now, so long as the treatment effect is positive there’s an argument for going to an elite school, but since elite schools are expensive (both in cash and in signalling to get there) the treatment effect needs to be above some threshold to be worthwhile, and I haven’t run the numbers to figure out where I think that threshold is.
Perhaps this is implicit in what you say, but signaling and social networking benefits from going to an Ivy League may play major roles independently of human capital.
I try to use the phrase “treatment effect” to encompass both capital improvements and social networking, “sheepskin effect” to encompass signalling, and “selection effect” to encompass ability bias. It seems to me that social capital (i.e. knowing other people and them knowing you) could be wrapped into human capital directly without much loss.
I was nodding along here until the last sentence. What you did in high school will usually cease to be relevant after some time, while the signalling value of a sufficiently prestigious college remains. You can usually make up missed learning opportunities from high school, such as the molecular biology course given in the example, whereas the window where your activities will be relevant to college placement is much narrower.
For a sufficiently conscientious student, the value of high school may be primarily what it gives them the opportunity to signal, rather than what it gives the opportunity to learn, aside perhaps from lessons of a social rather than academic sort.
As JonahSinick notes, many high school students and their parents believe this both by stated and revealed preference, and I think they are correct although the magnitude of the effect is hard to pin down. If nothing else, however, if you greatly surpass the academic standards of a college, they will give you merit scholarships in order to get you to pick their college, and the amounts here can be very large especially if the alternative was being forced to borrow money at interest! Thus, signaling is at a minimum a paying job.