Hard work matters most for college success
(From American Teacher, April 2000)

What leads to success after college--the people you know, what you know, or how you've come to know it? Do degrees from elite institutions have greater intrinsic value than degrees from less selective institutions--no matter the effort or sensibility that went into earning them? Is a college education a thing of substance or a self-marketing tool?

For those parents and students who have wondered if it's worth the financial sacrifice to acquire a degree from a selective college, two researchers have an answer: Probably not. A new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) suggests that if you have the profile of someone who could be admitted to an elite college, your earnings 20 years out of school will be about the same no matter what college you choose to attend. To put it another way, it's how well students apply themselves to their studies that counts, not where they apply to study.

The paper, "Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An application of selection on observables and unobservables," is written by Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist, and Stacy Berg Dale, a researcher with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They looked at 6,300 students who enrolled in college in 1976 and matched them up by academic characteristics into sets of students who could have gone to elite institutions but chose not to with students who did enroll in the elite institutions. Studying labor earnings charts for 1995, the authors found that students at non-elite institutions earned about the same as the elite graduates. One exception was students from low-income families whose elite degrees tended to increase their earnings potential.

"What seems to matter for economic success is that the students are highly motivated and willing to work hard, rather than just going to a highly selective school," Krueger told the Wall Street Journal.

These findings contradict earlier studies documenting the increased value of the selective college degree. The findings support legions of teachers, parents and high school counselors, however, who drum home the message that being motivated and working hard are what pay off in the long run.