Looking into the 2011 Dale/Krueger study, the "significant" boost for minorities wasn't gigantic and had caveats. For the attended-in-1976 minority cohort, the

Looking into the 2011 Dale/Krueger study, the "significant" boost for minorities wasn't gigantic and had caveats. For the attended-in-1976 minority cohort, they found a 6.7% higher income in 2007 for those choosing a more selective – but falling to 1.6% (said by the authors to be "indistinguishable from zero") if the selectivity-outlier historically-black colleges were excluded. For the entered-in-1989 minority cohort, the income boost in 2007 was higher – 12-14%, and survived the exclusion of historically-black colleges. (One way to interpret that might be: the income boost becomes smaller the longer you're out of college.) Perhaps most interesting: if a student's parents had an average of 12-years education (~high school), selective-attendance gave a 5.2% income boost. But if parents had an average of 16-years (~college), selective attendance gave no income benefits. But none of these boosts among less-privileged subgroups are very large. The paper also mentions some reasons its estimates of the benefits of selectivity (even where negligible) could be too high, including: * if selective schools are more generous with financial aid – you and the NPR article both suggest this is the case * if students with high unobserved earning potential are more likely to attend selective schools – seems likely to me, when a student is confident they have the skills, ambitions, or personal contacts to earn a lot post-graduation So sure, include the Dale/Krueger subgroup estimates in the pitch that selective colleges make. But many low-income students might hear, "you'll get roughly a 5-14% income boost"… and still pass, picking less-selective colleges that match their other academic/community/career/family/friend priorities. I get why the elite universities want more low-income enrollees: it's a key part of their self-image of outreach & uplift, helps justify their immense costs to others, and immunizes them against other criticisms. But for the low-income students themselves, even given a more-than-zero benefit shown by Dale/Krueger, it's not a slam-dunk decision. When such students choose elsewhere, they may be expressing their own smarts and self-knowledge.