A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on August 5th, 2008 in General

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that education is not a big leveller:

Where people go to college can make a big difference in starting pay, and that difference is largely sustained into midcareer, according to a large study of global compensation.

In the yearlong effort, PayScale Inc., an online provider of global compensation data, surveyed 1.2 million bachelor’s degree graduates with a minimum of 10 years of work experience (with a median of 15.5 years). The subjects hailed from more than 300 U.S. schools ranging from state institutions to the Ivy League, and their incomes show that the subject you major in can have little to do with your long-term earning power.

There’s some attempt to justify this by saying that Ivy Leaguers somehow “gravitate” or “opt for” careers in consulting, which tends to pay more than other career choices. The problem is that this explanation is too shallow to be of much use. I don’t think someone who goes to, for example, Texas Tech wants to get paid less or is less likely to come up with the idea of consulting. The problem is that when a potential customer looks at consultants, and sees one from Columbia and one from Texas Tech…well, it isn’t difficult to figure out who has the advantage.

It also doesn’t deal with the fact that the smartest kid in Lubbock, Texas is much more likely to end up at Tech than at Harvard. This is all the more true if the kid has parents that went to Texas A&M or UT or if the kid’s folks never went to college at all.

The state universities and liberal arts schools are still a ticket up to the middle class for a lot of people. But the ladder of opportunity ends there.

Take a look:

We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students’ subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.

In other words, the earning capacity of the average college student is determined by their background characteristics – before they even consider college. The impact on earnings for those pitifully few students that find a way into the elite schools is a dramatic reminder that there is the possibility of rising above one’s raising, but the pathway is largely blocked for most of us.

In short: Elite education doesn’t matter, except perhaps for the very students that elite universities’ admissions and financial aid practices are excluding.

I believe the author of that post then reaches the wrong conclusion when he quotes an earlier research conclusion:

The C student from Princeton earns more than the A student from Podunk not mainly because he has the prestige of a Princeton degree, but merely because he is abler. The golden touch is possessed not by the Ivy League College, but by its students.

This deserves a bit more explanation. It sounds like it is saying that Ivy League students are simply abler and therefore make it into elite universities because they are smarter and then they get paid more in life because of it. The relationship is much more complex than that – although it is undeniably true for some students.

PS – you will make no friends for pointing out this problem.

The A student at Podunk may actually be abler than the C student at Princeton. But, as is noted in the discussion of disadvantaged students, it is the contacts made at the university that provide future benefits. So, in a way, it is the students – but it is also the professors and the internships and the placement programs. It becomes a self-reinforcing system.

Is it wrong? That’s an individual assessment. If nothing else, though, it should give the lie to the idea that “anyone can get ahead”. As with everything else, money buys privilege, and privilege begets more privilege. Yeah, a few people make it through – but they are the exception that proves the rule rather than a rule unto themselves.

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