How Important
is Attending an Elite College?
In The Atlantic Monthly’s recent “College
Admissions 2004 Annual Survey” issue, Gregg Easterbrook,
visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, cited
research conducted by Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale
who “dropped a bomb on the notion of elite-college
attendance as essential to success later in life.” Their
study demonstrated that, on average, students who had
been accepted at an Ivy institution and who attended
a less well-known school made “the same income
twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges….the
student, not the school, was responsible for success.” (Gregg
Easterbrook, “Who Needs Harvard?,” The
Atlantic Monthly, October 2004, pp. 128-9.)
Easterbrook examines the importance
of earning a college degree and expands upon the
theme that many colleges,
not just the “Gotta-Get-Ins,” are capable
of preparing graduates for both economic and academic
success.
"The elites still lead in producing undergraduates
who go on for doctorates (Caltech had the highest percentage
during the 1990s), but Earlham, Grinnell, Kalamazoo,
Kenyon, Knox, Lawrence, Macalester, Oberlin, and Wooster
do better on this scale than many higher-status schools.
In the 1990s little Earlham, with just 1,200 students,
produced a higher percentage of graduates who have
since received doctorates than did Brown, Dartmouth,
Duke, Northwestern, Penn, or Vassar. (p. 130)"
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