>Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. I think a minor edit makes this stat

>Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. I think a minor edit makes this statement more accurate: Basically, people who complete higher education get a 50% premium on their efforts in aggregate. Though as others have noted before, this level of analysis is in and of itself problematic. If top performers for multiple generations have entered the higher education system, it is difficult to separate out the confounded variables of natural ability, drive, and the "higher education premium" (so to speak). How do we necessarily know that college graduates are earning more due to their education, and not because the population of the most driven and/or most able individuals happens to go to college? It's a difficult problem. The only real viable suggestion I've heard is to compare earnings of individuals with similar pre-college academic performance who attended college to those who didn't. Most likely, these individuals would have to be on the threshold of collegiate entrance (by SAT, GPA, etc.), so perhaps even this analysis would not properly assess the benefit of college to high performing students.