What Elite Schools Genuinely Provide — and Who Actually Benefits

Honesty requires stating the other side plainly: top schools are not a pure prestige illusion. The most careful study to date — by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman, using tax records and a clever comparison of waitlisted students — found concrete advantages for Ivy-Plus attendance.

The documented elite advantage

Attending an Ivy-Plus college rather than a strong public flagship increases a student's chance of reaching the top 1% of earners by about 60%.
It roughly triples the odds of working at a prestigious firm.
It nearly doubles the odds of attending an elite graduate school.

Look closely at what those outcomes have in common: they are gateways, not averages. The elite advantage is concentrated in a narrow band of prestige-gated destinations — investment banking, top-tier consulting, elite law and medical schools, certain quant-finance and venture roles — where recruiting historically happens on a short list of campuses, and where the alumni network functions as a door-opening machine.

If a student's ambitions genuinely point there, school tier is a real variable. Saying otherwise would be dishonest.

But the average student earns about the same

Here is the finding that should reframe most families' decisions: for the typical student, the elite premium on average earnings largely evaporates once you account for who the student already was.

The landmark Dale–Krueger studies compared students accepted by the same selective schools, where some attended and some went elsewhere — and found they earned about the same decades later. The Chetty team's modern data agrees: outside the top-1%-style gateway outcomes, attending the elite school instead of the flagship moves average earnings surprisingly little. The student, not the sticker on the diploma, carries most of the earning power.

The crucial exception — and it may be you

Both research lines found that low-income, first-generation, Black, and Hispanic students DO earn significantly more from attending selective schools. The likely mechanism is access: elite schools provide networks, information, and polish that affluent families transmit at home.

If your family has no college-going history or limited professional networks, prestige is worth more to you — this is one of the few places in admissions where the conventional wisdom underestimates the value.

→ Chetty, Deming & Friedman (2023) — NBER Working Paper 31492