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Does it pay to go to a more selective school?
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By Gabriel Martinez, September 10, 2010 in Outside the Classroom, Professional Development

According to this old (and famous) study, it does not.  It's smarts, and not reputation of school, that counts: if you are smart enough to get into a high-reputation school, then you should be able to have a bigger paycheck twenty years later, whether you actually attended it or not.  The Dale and Krueger paper makes this point by comparing the salaries of people who were accepted by high-ranked schools, but turned them down in favor of a low-rank, low-price competitor, versus those who actually attended the high-rank school.

Or, like this piece pointed out

Consider the CEOs of the top ten Fortune 500 corporations: only four went to elite schools.

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1 Comment
Lee Trepanier on Sep 10, 2010 at 9:49 am

However, reputation does provide more opportunties than smarts without reputation.

As far as the 4 out of 500 being CEO's of the top 10 fortune 500, I would refer to David Brook's column at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks

about the author

Gabriel Martinez
Gabriel Martinez

I am Associate Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Ave Maria University. I have been in the Economics Department since its beginning and have taught over fifteen different courses at Ave Maria University, particularly in the areas of macroeconomics, international economics, development economics, Catholic social teaching, economic history, and social philosophy. My two favorite courses to teach are Intermediate Macroeconomics and Markets, State, and Institutions.

My work is in the general area of international finance and open-economy macroeconomics, with a focus on developing countries. My dissertation focused on the 1999 economic collapse in Ecuador,using a combination of historical, theoretical, and empirical analyses. My paper on the role of deregulation, moral hazard, and overconfidence in the Ecuadorian financial crisis was published by the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Financial crises are a perennial topic, with causes that are complex and deep, inextricably intermingled with politics and ethics. My Ph.D. is from the University of Notre Dame.