Money isn't everything: linking college choice to winning prizes and professorships

Abstract

We expand upon the literature that considers how characteristics of undergraduate schools affect nonincome outcomes by considering Nobel Prize winners and full professors at top 25 universities. We introduce National Merit Scholars (NMS) as a percentage of 1960–1961 class as a time-appropriate measure of student quality and show how this measure largely matches up with prior expectations and observed outcomes. We conclude with the discussion of the convex relation between NMS and these professional outcomes.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University for financial support. Tony Henke and Farhan Majid provided excellent research assistance.

Notes

¹Long (2008) provides a thorough survey in addition to some reconciliation of the various positions, but see also Behrman et al. (1996), Black and Smith (2006), Brewer et al. (1999), Dale and Krueger (2002), Eide et al. (1998), Hoekstra (2009) and Lindahl and Regner (2005).

²The full list of schools can be found in the Appendix, as can other criteria used for categorization.

³Unreported results included current school-level information on recent SAT scores (average and 25%–75% range). Such variables only rarely achieved statistical significance and never approached the power of the National Merit Scholars (NMS) variables.

⁴As we cannot compute true ex post probabilities, we ask the reader's indulgence as we use ‘probability’, ‘percentage’ and ‘per-capita’ to denote our available scaled version of these concepts.

⁵See Cameron and Trivedi (2005). We regress the log of squared residuals on the relevant set of variables to obtain our predicted covariance matrix of the disturbance. Given our relatively small sample sizes, simple White-corrected SEs were too imprecise to draw any conclusions.

⁶Schools with NMS/size ratios near 0.02 are Barnard, Case Western, Duke and Northwestern.

⁷Besides Rice (0.085), schools with NMS/size ratios near this threshold are Macalester (0.090) and Oberlin (0.084).

⁸The Ivies ordered by this measure are Harvard (0.169), Princeton (0.067), Yale (0.053), Dartmouth (0.023), Columbia (0.016), Brown (0.015), Cornell (0.015) and Penn (0.005).