Question: do elite institution degrees confer any addition to market value commensurate with their cost, or do they simply select for people who already have high market value?
> 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.
I came away thinking that parental influence is the most important factor. If your child is well-nurtured enough to be within a crap shoot of selection for an elite institution, it probably doesn't really matter if they get in or not, they'll be successful regardless (for mysterious reasons that may be interesting to know, but don't really matter).
As such, it's better not to make your kid focus on "getting in" (which is a suspect goal for many reasons), but instead on trying their best to realize their full potential.
Speaking only for STEM, an elite STEM program gives the student access to a bigger variety of upperclassman courses; compare the available course list for a community college vs a large university and the difference is quite noticeable. The better programs also provide access to better equipment and advising; e.g., various University of California campuses have their own on-site chip fabrication labs. If the career trajectory you're planning benefits from those advanced courses, going to the better STEM programs is going to help tremendously. If not, well, they don't but that's hardly the institution's fault; they aren't choosing who to send your resume to, you are.
(As an aside, I use the word "access" very intentionally; educational institutions don't "confer" anything. Students get access to resources and opportunities and they choose which to take. It's entirely possible to do the minimum to fulfill requirements; for example, I chose easy courses to do the minimum fulfill my humanities requirements because it wasn't where my interests lay.)
[1] For the curious, it was the notion of comparative advantage, which was counterintuitive for me too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
'Elite' state schools (GA Tech, Michigan State? Etc) probably have excellent ROI.
Expensive, not really elite schools are probably not worth it on average, but again, cost varies highly, so ...
The highest cost seems to be for good-but-not-best institutions that have some specific niche/selling point for them but are not particularly selective and will accept almost anyone who will pay their price.
Like, if some school wants to build a reputation for having the best scientists or lawyers then they have to be somewhat selective with respect to performance and have very competitive admissions, but you also need to ensure that the particular young students with most potential can actually afford to study there; but if a school just wants to provide a good education in X and does not care who will enroll, they can just ramp up the fees until the applicants filter themselves out.
I do think that on top of that, they add value because students can be given more challenging and stimulating coursework. The difference in Math education between a top college and a college with loose entry requirements is staggering - we're talking people doing hard proofs freshman year vs. undergrad seniors taking upper level math courses that don't even have proofs, just computation.
I think the kind of longitudinal studies needed combined with a small “treatment” group make this kind of investigation as hard to do as a nutritional study.