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Economics 101 — Don’t Pay a lot for College

Discouraging information for those paying off student loans:

In the end, should students and parents just stop fretting over the high cost of elite universities and instead opt for a lower-priced public college? Probably. It turns out that where students go as undergraduates doesn’t help them earn more money over their lifetimes, according to a 2002 study by Stacy Dale, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J., and Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics and public affairs professor. Their study looked at 14,238 full-time workers who were freshmen in 1976. The ones who were bright enough to get into the highest-ranked — but usually expensive — schools but then didn’t attend, did just as well in their careers as the students who did matriculate at those schools. “What we found is that it doesn’t matter where you went to school, but who you are,” Dale says.


via Economics 101 — Forbes.com.

Every now and then it’s nice to hear that being hard working and capable actually does take you places.