How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced from
Learning
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/
Daniel Markovits, Professor at Yale Law School, notes:
Because education, like aristocratic rank, is a positional good, the most elite educations yield the greatest returns: “The value to me of my education,” a well-known economist once observed, “depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.” In law, graduates of top-10 schools make on average half more than graduates of schools ranked 21 to 100; at the most profitable law firm in America, where partners make more than $6 million a year, more than 90 percent of the partners graduated from a top-10 law school. Top investment banks recruit from only a handful of colleges—sometimes just Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and perhaps MIT and Williams College. A survey of a narrowly targeted set of top jobs reports, almost unbelievably, that “nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only 12 universities.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/
Daniel Markovits, Professor at Yale Law School, notes:
Because education, like aristocratic rank, is a positional good, the most elite educations yield the greatest returns: “The value to me of my education,” a well-known economist once observed, “depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.” In law, graduates of top-10 schools make on average half more than graduates of schools ranked 21 to 100; at the most profitable law firm in America, where partners make more than $6 million a year, more than 90 percent of the partners graduated from a top-10 law school. Top investment banks recruit from only a handful of colleges—sometimes just Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and perhaps MIT and Williams College. A survey of a narrowly targeted set of top jobs reports, almost unbelievably, that “nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only 12 universities.”
Related:
Why rich parents have rich children
https://voxeu.org/article/why-rich-parents-have-rich-children
“The children of rich families tend to go to better quality schools, have higher cognitive skills, and complete more years of schooling. This column exploits unique data from the National Child Development study to determine these early childhood factors go on to have long-run impacts on an individual’s lifetime earnings, perpetuating a cycle of wealth. These results suggest that policies that equalise investments, such as improving school quality, could promote income mobility”.
https://voxeu.org/article/why-rich-parents-have-rich-children
“The children of rich families tend to go to better quality schools, have higher cognitive skills, and complete more years of schooling. This column exploits unique data from the National Child Development study to determine these early childhood factors go on to have long-run impacts on an individual’s lifetime earnings, perpetuating a cycle of wealth. These results suggest that policies that equalise investments, such as improving school quality, could promote income mobility”.