What's the Value of an Ivy Degree?

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

In 1995 Northwestern's football team, which had been truly terrible for decades, won the Big Ten and, improbably enough, made the Rose Bowl. There's about a month's lag time between the end of the regular season and the Rose Bowl, and so for weeks every newscast included a couple of minutes of Darnell Autry and Steve Schnur, the Northwestern stars, cavorting around Disneyland with Charlton Heston and David Schwimmer, alumni of NU's prestigious acting program who had recently discovered a potent attachment to the gridiron. It certainly makes for more holiday-friendly programming.

The result, in the larger terms of college football, was not terribly significant. Northwestern was crushed in the Rose Bowl by a much more professional-looking outfit—the University of Washington. When Autry and Schnur and a couple of other indispensables graduated—or at least ran out of eligibility—the team began a slow sink back into mediocrity. Now, just a few years later, the relevant coach has left, no cable outlet worth its salt is willing to put Northwestern games on national television, and the Wildcats have a hard time beating even Indiana.

But the result, in the equally highly attended-to and possibly more important game of college admissions, was tangible, and lasting.

In December of that year, my prep-school's college counselor, who on a good day could out-worry three boroughs, rushed into a meeting with me (I remember him rubbing his temples and juggling his glasses, but my memory could be taking liberties) and preemptively crossed Northwestern off of my “medium-reaches” list.

“They made the Rose Bowl,” he said. “Applications have gone up forty percent. I'm sorry but there's just no way.” He put Northwestern on another, much shorter, list of schools—right between Harvard and Williams.

The point, which was not lost on administrators at Stanford and Wisconsin, schools known for academics who have garnered a great deal of attention for their athletic success in recent years, is that there is not as much difference between the elite schools and the rest of the bunch as we would like to think. The sort of people who really care about the Rose Bowl are the same sort of people whose passions could upset the balance of an application pool at, say, Yale, or Dartmouth, or Northwestern.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Stacy Berg Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, makes an even more arresting point. Put baldly, their paper says that, in terms of future success, the renown of your college makes no real difference.

The report studied a large sampling of freshman entering a range of schools in 1976. The institutions ranged from Princeton to Penn State. Krueger and Dale went to the admissions departments of all of the relevant schools and found out which students had been accepted or rejected at which schools.

The researchers were after a fairly narrow statistical group: those students who had been admitted by elite schools—Northwestern or Dartmouth or Swarthmore—but had chosen instead to enroll in institutions of lesser prestige—Denison, for example. What Krueger and Dale wanted to figure out was whether or not these students suffered for not taking the proffered grant of Ivy League admission. Conventional wisdom, after all, held that these students should have charged for the Ivy gates with head down and blinders firmly on. If nothing else, people said then and say now, going to an elite school will make you richer, by degrees.

Let's backtrack for a moment. Krueger and Dale chose 1976 for a reason. As Nicolas Lemann explains in his recent book, The Big Test: A Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by 1976 all of the cliches about the Ivy League's old boy network had pretty much disappeared from reality. At that time, the Ivy League was claiming, with some tangible justification, to be interested primarily in educating a meritocracy. So 1976 was one of the first years in which the most talented students were regularly being offered admission at elite schools, regardless of race, class, or pre-existing history of discrimination.

Krueger and Dale took that narrow group and looked at a key indicator from 1995, when most of the applicants were forty years old: their income. Then they examined the same variable for graduates from the elite schools in the same year, and came to a rather stark conclusion: if you were smart enough to be accepted at a top-tier school, whether you actually attended that school made no statistical difference in your income twenty years down the road.

Students who had enrolled in colleges where the average freshman SAT score was 1,200 earned about $76,800, while students who were accepted by the elite colleges, but who had enrolled in institutions where the average SAT was 1,000, earned $77,700.

“It's not the school that has the magic touch,” Krueger told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “It's the students.”

Where you attend college does not determine how successful you will be. What determines how successful you will be is how talented and committed you are—the same things that get you into good colleges in the first place.

Proponents of the Ivy League will argue here that there are substantial benefits to an Ivy League education—having intelligent people around all the time, the headiness of the intellectual climate, the pride that comes with thinking (however ill-based the thought may be, we've certainly all entertained it) that we are among the very best. Yet, write Krueger and Dale, “An able student who attends a lower tier school can find able students to study with,” just like a student at an Ivy League school can always surround himself with dolts. And the same goes for one's academic endeavors or intellectual pride. In short, higher education is what you make of it.

Krueger's and Dale's result, moreover, held for both blacks and whites, undermining the case for racial preferences in admissions. Talented people will, ultimately, succeed, no matter where they go to school or what color their skin is.

The basis for much statistical and rhetorical hand-wringing about the college admissions process is the sentiment that the people who get to go to Harvard will end up running the country, and that, therefore, we have a tangible stake, as a country with real faith in professing our own democratic ideals, in making sure that the decision about who gets to go to Harvard is as fair as possible. This is the line of thinking that has driven the rather nonsensical recent arguments about the viability of standardized testing in the admissions process (see TDR, 10/12/99).

What the Krueger and Dale study says, then, is that these considerations are not terribly important. A student's credentials may dazzle interviewers when he first enters the job market, but, soon after that, his competence matters much more. If a person who goes to Oklahoma State is as smart and talented and capable as someone who gets into Princeton, he'll end up doing just as well.

The reasoning behind the assorted games in college admissions is that students, especially minorities, will suffer particularly acutely if they are denied access to elite schools. Krueger and Dale say, no, they won't. And if students gain such access, it might not make a difference, anyway. More important than admission to an elite school are the values and academic discipline that qualify a student for admission in the first place.

The ultimate point of the Krueger and Dale study is that Dartmouth alumni are successful not because Dartmouth makes them talented, but because Dartmouth had the foresight to admit talented students. There's no inherent and unalienable value in a Dartmouth degree. What makes Dartmouth worthwhile is the substance of its educational experience and the knowledge it imparts. Not necessarily knowledge of annual rates of return, or other pragmatics, but the substantive stuff of which liberal education is made.