Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com

Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html Some would probably argue that going to a big name school allows you to make better connections, etc, thus resulting in a higher income. But as pointed out in the Gladwell article, this just isn't the case. While it's easy to point out the kid that went to MIT is making more than the kid that went to state college, this just isn't a proper comparison. From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't." The moral of the story is that if you're a hard working individual, connections and money are going to follow regardless of where you go to school.