<p>I am struck by some of the facile assertions on this thread. I’ll mention three.</p>
<p>(1) “Top-notched scientists, researchers, professors earn very little.” By what standard are you saying “very little”? As someone who has spent his career in academia I can say that that statement is just dead wrong about top-notch university scientists and professors. At the peak of their careers they are likely to be earning salaries that are roughly in the top 10-15% of the income distribution. That is not “very little.” And of course many top-notched scientists and researchers work in industry or national institutes or labs (think NIH, CDC, Los Alamos, etc.). They, too, earn excellent salaries and generally have excellent fringe benefits as well.</p>
<p>(2) “Any engineering is more trade school than education…” This is a very uninformed statement. ANY engineering? Engineering programs are very demanding, that is for sure. But the best engineers are going to be doing a lot more than what a “technician” with a degree from a trade school or community college can do. The stronger their intellectual curiosity and ability to think creatively and theoretically about design and production problems the better engineers they are going to be.</p>
<p>(3) “The ivy league …is for the insecure who need some sort of validation” – has already been addressed by fenwaypark.</p>
<p>Finally let me add that the Dale and Krueger studies are well designed and informative pieces of research that told us something that we may have thought we knew already but nobody had been clever enough to find systematic evidence for.</p>