Was it worth it?

The celebrities and C.E.O.s arrested in this week’s college bribery scandal were charged with paying up to $1.2 million for guaranteed admission to elite universities. And of course there’s a much larger and mostly legal system whereby rich people pull strings, hire consultants and make enormous tax-deductible donations, all in the hopes of improving their children’s college chances.

Yet academic research suggests that these efforts are mostly a waste of money, and that the seized opportunities would have actually helped other students much more.

In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students’ SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are “generally indistinguishable from zero.” Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they don’t get into the Ivy League.

But there was a crucial exception. There were strong benefits for the subset of black and Hispanic students, and for those whose parents had few educational credentials. It turns out that students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges. Elite higher education gives them social capital they didn’t already have.