THE STASH OCTOBER 28, 2009
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A new NBER paper (ungated version) from Stanford's Caroline M. Hoxby finds that even as it's grown increasingly difficult to get into a top university, the average selectivity of all colleges has actually fallen over time:
students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body.
What's interesting is that the change in selectivity is driven largely by smarter students choosing to go to universities with similarly smart students. So, colleges that had an initial selectivity advantage, i.e. the Ivies, were the natural targets for this evolution in student preferences.
And these students, being the young whipper-snappers they are, have managed to get a really economic good deal in the process:
even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.
The following chart captures some of the benefits of going to a selective school (click for larger):
3 comments
I have heard from a few people who work in the Financial sector in New York that the first question in an interview is often "So, what school did you go to?", even for people with 10+ years in the industry! And further that this can be a serious problem for people who went to good public schools in states that have a good public university sector. So while it may be that people get a better education at Ivy League schools and hence are worth more, but it may also be that there is a significant level of self-selecting snobbishness at work in one of the most lucrative sectors here.
- Nari224
October 28, 2009 at 11:34am
Off topic relative to schools, but in Chicago today there is a large anti-bank protest going on. It'll be interesting to see if anything newsworthy beyond the fact that there was a large protest going on comes of it. Protesters are telling the banks to stop resisting refom (in general).
- jet
October 28, 2009 at 3:49pm
OK I went to an Ivy League school, and I find this post, and the accompanying chart, indecipherable. I'm sure the statistics cited somehow indicate that schools have become less selective (though it's not clear how students looking for other top students and better resources have this result) and that students at top schools get a "good deal." But I have to take it on faith because it's ... indecipherable. The chart shows school resources based on how selective they were in 1962. And that is supposed to show .. what? I take it that this post would have to be about 3 or 4 times longer than it is to make sense.
- jayfram
October 29, 2009 at 2:47pm