[especkman]

As noted, these influences can be very disentangle from any real-world analysis.

There was an interesting study a few years back that looked at the "outcomes" of a cohort of people who had all been admitted to an Ivy League school. Part of the study group attended and graduated from the Ivy League school they were admitted to. The control group ended up matriculating elsewhere for whatever reason.

Past studies showed at a significant improvement in earning potential for Ivy League grads, but they didn't have a distinguished control group. What this recent study found was that for most students of similar qualification (all judged to be Ivy League material by the admissions boards at Ivy Leage schools), attending an Ivy conferred no obvious advantage compared to attending a non-Ivy.

The only difference was for students who came from more challenging backgrounds, those whose families may have flirted with poverty and/or didn't have significant educational attainment. In those cases, attending an Ivy conferred some advantage over going elsewhere.

[falsestprophet]

I remember this article and I recall the conclusion it reached was that the students from poorer backgrounds benefited so dramatically because they were indoctrinated with the culture of the ruling class in the Ivy League and would likely not have been elsewhere.

[pg]

Do you have a reference for this study?

[jlhamilton]

It's probably http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf. I found the link from an article on CNN at http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/20/pf/expert/ask_expert/