Extrapolate that from school to life and you start to see why graduates of these elite schools on the whole tend to be more successful. And yet what this resea

Extrapolate that from school to life and you start to see why graduates of these elite schools on the whole tend to be more successful. And yet what this research and other studies like it are showing is that, for STEM majors, the kind of people you are talking about are equally successful regardless of where they go to school. The school itself doesn't add anything to their success; it's just that those who are going to be more successful anyway, regardless of school, are better at getting into harder-to-get-into schools. And as for the connections, these comments keep talking about how the better schools give you better connections. If so, this research showing no mid-career earnings advantage suggests that if those "better" connections are worth anything at all, it isn't money or things that show up as more money such as better jobs, more access to jobs, more job stability, etc. My interpretation, though, and my own experience, is that the connections ARE worth money, but that birds of a feather soon flock together after graduation, regardless of where they went to school. Stanford and MIT engineers don't go to the same school, and if you have as much in common with them out in the working world as they have with each other, you will soon have similar connections and similar lives.