Actually, the chart shows a pretty damning story for selection bias: despite all the selectivity of schools, there's no sign of improvement in returns for more

Actually, the chart shows a pretty damning story for selection bias: despite all the selectivity of schools, there's no sign of improvement in returns for more selective engineering schools. It makes a bit of intuitive sense: any MIT/CMU/Stanford/etc premium on degrees would be capped by management salary structure, since fresh grads don't typically earn more than their boss. It's possible that a linear fit is not a great model, as the little data there is on the far left chart is all above average, but the 10x engineer isn't registering on the radar. As for what people can do differently: if you have equal chances of succeeding at the most selective arts and humanities college, or the least selective engineering, choosing engineering will net you better 20 year salaries. Especially relevant if you're considering humanities as a law degree path -- the LSAT has logical reasoning test, and if you can hack that, you can probably do okay in engineering math / CS classes.