That hasn't stopped them from trying. One of the earlier such efforts was a 1999 paper in The Journal of Human Resources that looked at data on thousands students who went to college in the 1970s and 80s. The researchers grouped their subjects' schools by reputation using old college guide books, then compared their post-campus wages.

The rankings, it turned out, mattered a great deal. The more elite a school, the better its alums' paychecks. The effect also increased over time. Among students who had graduated high school in 1980, those who had gone on to a top private university eventually made 20 percent more than their counterparts from bottom tier public school. For the class of 1972, the wage boost was just 9 percent.

The graph below shows data from the high school class of 1982. Again, whether public or private, a college's quality (or at least its reputation for quality) had a significant impact.

The study did have a large hole: It didn't separate students who actually graduated college from the dropouts. That likely pulled down the wage averages at less renowned institutions, which tend to have lower completion rates. But studies since have still detected a similar pattern. In 2000, a Department of Education report found that, overall, the quality of a college decided 2-to-3 percent of earnings among men and 4-to-6 percent in women -- making it less important than how they actually performed in class. But in some cases, the effect was much larger. Men who went to an institution that was one standard deviation better on its quality measures saw their salaries jump 8.1 percent. For women, the boost was 17.4 percent. The report's author calculated that for males, the increase could translate to an extra $107,000 over the course of a lifetime. For females, it might mean an extra $173,000. To put that in context, people who go to college make somewhere between $412,000 and $570,000 more on average than those who don't, according to various estimates.

Study 2: IF YALE REJECTS ME, AM I DOOMED?

Nope. There's evidence that where you apply is more important than where you attend.



In studies this decade, academics have gone out in search of naturally occurring experiments to try and figure out if it's the school that counts when it comes to earning potential, or the student. One of the best known efforts was by Stacy Berg Dale of the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Alan Kreuger of Princeton, who came to the unexpected conclusion that, in some respects, where you went to college was less important than where you applied.

Here's how they got there. Using information on undergraduates from the late 1970s, the authors matched students who had been accepted and rejected by similarly selective colleges.* In effect, they created imaginary groups of academic siblings. As expected, most of these siblings chose to attend the most selective school they got into. But a few decided to attend a less selective college. That gave the researchers a chance to see what would happen when young people who were equally talented in the classroom -- at least on paper -- picked different quality institutions.