> I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money
Is it, though? Of course people who go to Harvard et al. do well afterwards, but many of them came from wealthy families and were bound to do well no matter what. If you’re poor, Harvard [1] is less likely to make you rich than UC Riverside [2].
Which measure are you going off there? Because I see the "Chance a poor student has to become a rich adult" metric at 41% for UC Riverside and 58% for Harvard.
There is the "overall mobility" metric that favors UC Riverside, but the way that's being measured would seem to skew in favor of whichever college has students in lower quintiles (a top quintile kid can't move up 2 quintiles).
Ah, you're right, I misread. But 41% vs 58% isn't a big enough difference to pay "any amount" for IMO - and the gap is much smaller with other public universities like Irvine (55%) and SUNY Binghampton (54%).
Quintiles is a poor measure given the extremes of inequality. The Pareto distribution of income and wealth has folks in the top 10/1/.1/.01 percentiles with vastly different lifestyles compared to the other percentiles.
"Any amount of money" when the statistics are still a coin toss sounds like a gambling addict. That's insanely bad odds for "life savings" amounts of money...
Money is not the same as status, and opens different job opportunities like key government officials . I would be more interested in a survey that includes whether the participant was satisfied with their career trajectory
There is the "overall mobility" metric that favors UC Riverside, but the way that's being measured would seem to skew in favor of whichever college has students in lower quintiles (a top quintile kid can't move up 2 quintiles).