Is money the main factor in deciding on college?

[Data10]

@PurpleTitan

One charge leveled at the D&K study is that they had a pretty expansive definition of “most selective colleges”. I believe it included HYPSM down to the CWRU tier.

I believe you are describing Barron’s selectivity index. The D&K study compared results with 2 proxies for selectivity – one was average SAT score of students attending the college, and the other was Barron’s selectivity index. Average SAT score would distinguish between HYPSM and CWRU. Barron’s selectivity index would not. Both metrics showed the same result, which was a slight negative coefficient after self-revelation controls (negative = lower earnings) that was not statistically different from zero.