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I have to admit, I rather expected to see this.</p>
<ol>
<li>Payscale is not a “study”; it is based entirely on self-reported data rather than any kind of legitimate sampling technique.</li>
<li>It does not consider students who attend professional schools.</li>
<li>…nor is the cost of living in different areas accounted for.</li>
<li>There is no control for field of study.</li>
<li>There is also no control for student characteristics. Students at elite private universities are disproportionately likely to come from wealthy, educated backgrounds (see IPEDS data on full-pay numbers, Pell %s, etc). Your own claim that top schools attract more high-achieving students completely invalidates any causative relationship you might hope to create between school choice and future earning potential given that student goals are not equally distributed across schools of differing selectivities.
I don’t know of any data indicating that dentists from top schools make more than dentists from lower-ranked schools. Did you choose your dentist based on where they went to school?
Wrong. Medical schools are professional graduate schools; undergrad premeds are pre-professional not professional. A bachelors with a premed emphasis is not a professional degree; an ABET-accredited engineering degree is.</li>
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<p>Nursing and IT are closer to what I talked about, and to my knowledge these are not prestige-centric fields. Nor are they best practiced at Ivies.</p>