We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesPrestige gets credited with qualities it selected before it had a chance to create them. That is the central nuisance in the college argument.
Applicants to selective institutions already differ from the general population in grades, ambition, advice, confidence, family resources, networks and tolerance for enormous forms. Compare admitted students with everyone else and the institution inherits those prior differences as apparent impact.
Krueger and Dale found a more awkward comparison: people admitted to similarly selective colleges who then chose different ones. The offers reveal that institutions had evaluated them as roughly comparable candidates. Later earnings looked similar across those choices, which is rather less useful to anyone selling a famous badge as a salary machine.
The result concerns earnings. It does not contain lectures enjoyed, friendships made, laboratories discovered, geography, debt anxiety or whether four years were glorious. Those omissions do not restore the giant causal claim. They simply mark the boundary of the variable studied.
The prestige story prefers one shining cause because anxiety likes something purchasable. Admission becomes transformation. A name becomes destiny. The applicant’s previous eighteen years politely disappear from the brochure.
In the dataset, one column records where each person enrolled. Another records which colleges offered admission. The unfashionable second column carries much of the analytical weight. The follow-up questionnaire ends after income, occupation and education.