Does Where You Attend College Affect Job Prospects and Salary?

There was some debate in class today about whether the name of the school you attend makes a difference in your ability to get a job. As Melissa suggested, certainly students who attend, say, Ivy League schools are also going to have connections (though they may have had those connections through family ties prior to attending college), which may factor into a job candidate's chances of placement. Some of you also mentioned that the relative strength of the school's alumni network should also be considered. But as some quick Internet research shows, the answer is that it depends: Sara Lipka's article "Does It Matter Where You Go to College?" argues, based on the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, that differences in student performance depends more on individuals than on the schools themselves. Paul Graham, a programmer and author, demonstrates that experience and personal qualities like confidence, self-discipline, and motivation trump an alma mater's "brand name" (i.e., what you do with your education matters more than where you get it). Parsing Graham's discussion, Matthew K. Tabor argues that yes and no, it does/not matter where you choose to receive your college education (and, hearkening back to Newman and our own conversations, Tabor believes that the liberal arts provide students with "transferable skills" that prepare one for almost any kind of profession).

The Collegiate Employment Research Institute Web site includes annual reports (beginning in 2001) on trends in recruiting college graduates. The numbers aren't the only interesting aspect of these reports; so are the surveys of employers who shared their comparative perspectives on their recent college grad employees:

We cannot do the wealth of information in these comments justice in the space allocated here. Employers described the student of today in these terms as compared to a student 8 to 10 years ago. Today’s students are:

Well traveled
Technically adept
Team player
Ambitious
Better educated
Learns on own (as dictated by technology)
Holds high expectations for themselves
Relaxed, casual
Seeks quality of life – balance
Freedom to make choices (has a lot)
Highly confident

Their comparisons do not end here. In the same breath, they continue their description with a seemingly opposite set of characteristics. You would find it hard to believe that they were describing the same student when characterized as:

Unmotivated
Lacks focus (no long term goals)
Feels entitled, often arrogant
Communicates poorly
Self-centered/self-absorbed
Acts immaturely (poor social skills)
Short attention span
Reacts passively
Avoids risks (won’t accept challenges)
Fears failure
Lacks a sense of responsibility
Depends on others
Shows little work ethic

This article from the Wall Street Journal concludes that students who attend Ivy League schools tend to make over 30% more in salary than those who attend liberal arts colleges. The article includes links to tables for the median salaries earned by graduates of different types of schools (e.g., Ivy League vs. Liberal Arts vs. Public State). The tables do not account for issues like disparities in earnings based on sex, class, region (i.e., cost of living and wages in one state or part of the country may be higher than those in another) or the pursuit of graduate degrees (e.g., medicine, law, business, humanities, or sciences), so they are not comprehensive statistics. But these tables nevertheless give you a sense of how different versions of higher education may influence one's earnings--sometimes the starting salaries reveal marked differences that even out after several years, and sometimes the starting salaries are comparable while disparities emerge later in graduates' careers. This 1998 study by Stacy Berg Dale (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and Alan B. Krueger (Princeton) concludes the following:

[S]tudents who attended colleges with higher average SAT scores do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended a college with a lower average SAT score. However, the Barron's rating of school selectivity and the tuition charged by the school are significantly related to the students' subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.

I draw no conclusions here, but the debate is certainly wide-ranging and certainly should factor into pre-college students' decisions about what institution will best suit their needs and goals. Did it factor into yours?