Is the quality of education really better? My understanding is it's all just selection or an IQ test - strongest apply, strongest get in, places hire them based on the prestige of the name.
I do think education differences would also occur. It's simply not possible to scale undergraduate lectures, recitation, labs, lecture and small group spaces, etc, by a factor of 7-20x and keep the same quality. (At a minimum, it's not possible to do so quickly/in a single step.)
* I think it's a majority of the source of their prestige, but not exclusive.
What is your understanding based on?
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
That is interesting and surprises me: Certainly many elite jobs are available to Harvard graduates that aren't available to most others. I wonder how that fact (AFAICT) reconciles with the claim about income.
> That’s not “education” directly
Agreed - the market doesn't reward education, but how well you serve their particular corporate needs. Education isn't vocational training, especially at better schools.