Papers in the 1980s and 1990s routinely showed that graduates of highly selective schools earned 3% to 7% higher wages for every 100-point increase in their school’s average SAT score… However, critics suspected these earlier studies suffered from severe selection bias: highly selective colleges admit students who are already unusually talented, ambitious, and well-connected…. Dale and Krueger solved this selection problem with a clever strategy: they compared students who received the exact same set of college acceptances and rejections, but chose to attend different institutions…. Their core finding was that student quality matters much more than school quality: students with high academic capabilities and strong drive earned roughly the same later in life, regardless of whether they went to an Ivy League university or a less-selective public state school.
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