[scarmig]

> the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate

I'm pretty sure that's not true. I doubt there's much of an actual value-add in going to an elite school, but the average incomes of graduates of them are substantially higher than that of random public school graduates.

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors

[gnicholas]

You are correct that GP's statement is wrong. But research from 2011 showed that this may be largely due the fact that students going into Ivy League schools are more likely to be high achieving in the first place. [1]

> What they found was that two students with similar backgrounds, grades and test scores who applied to the same mix of selective and nonselective schools earned about the same later on, even if the first attended a selective school and the second didn’t. The choice of schools applied to was indicative of ambition which, they argue, is a more powerful driver of success than the school they attend. “The return to college selectivity [is] indistinguishable from zero,” they wrote in 2011.

However, researchers noted that for certain students, going to a more elite school did generate greater returns.

> focusing only on the benefits to the wealthy may miss the full picture. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger found that African-American and Hispanic students, and those whose parents didn’t go to college, actually did enjoy an income boost from a selective college, perhaps, the researchers said, owing to networking opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

1: https://outline.com/wWr2v3

[andrewmcwatters]

Fascinating, most of the top schools are engineering heavy, and their mid-career pays are exactly inline with engineering pay.

Who would have thought?

[hailwren]

Yes, and the gap grows even wider when you normalize for per-professional degree percentages (i.e. STEM/pharm/premed/prelaw/military inflating the bottom half of the curve)

[rhizome]

I'd also be interested to see the rates of claiming unemployment benefits across that spectrum.

[nitrogen]

My mediocre high school used to give presentations about how pointless it was to go to a big name school. One of the claims was that, after ten years, all differences in median incomes were gone. Curiously they didn't break it down into percentiles.

Everyone in the advisors' office bought into this public-school-to-public-university pipeline. My dream in junior high was to go to MIT. When I mentioned this to my guidance counselor, they said, basically, "Don't bother, you'll never get in." Self-fulfilling prophecy.

[tomp]

They were just managing expectations. Partially the kids’, partially the parents’

[nitrogen]

Managing expectations would be "Here's a plan to maximize your chances, but the chances are still slim, so pick several schools."

[Spooky23]

They were right.

The 90th percentile earner from the Harvard class of 2010 didn’t come from some random high school in Missouri with an 1000 median SAT score.

Guidance counselors suck every where. Mine was a national guard major, 18% of my class joined the military.

[nitrogen]

Medians are misleading. Some random high school in Missouri probably has outliers that it just doesn't know how to deal with. Additionally, maintaining low expectations perpetuates a cycle of underachievement.