GRADUATES FROM higher-ranked universities tend to earn more money. That is well known. What is less understood is why. One theory is that these schools are better at imparting knowledge—employers might reasonably offer higher salaries to new hires they believe are better qualified. An alternative theory is that admission is a form of signalling. Prestigious colleges are selective.
Ms Sekhri segmented the results of high-school exams into several “bins” on the x-axis, with 0 being the threshold for admission to public colleges. By comparing graduates whose test scores barely qualified them for public colleges with those who just missed out she was able to estimate the impact of elite-college admittance on grades and wages.
Her research suggests that students who performed just well enough on their high-school exams to attend a public college performed no better than those who fell just below the admission cut-off . Yet getting into a public school appears to have a marked effect on the wages that graduates can command, boosting earnings by roughly 40%, or 8,000 rupees per month in 2012 .
The study should be treated with some caution. It is based on a survey of just 1,500 respondents, which means the data appear noisy. Still, the fact that graduates who were only narrowly qualified for public colleges performed little better in the final tests but earned so much more than their peers who just missed out suggests the signalling effect is important.
There is another possible explanation for this wage gap. Higher-ranked colleges might have more effective careers offices and alumni networks. It is possible that job candidates could have an easier time applying to firms which already employ workers from their universities. In short, elite colleges probably do offer their students more value than their competitors—just not in their lecture halls.
Hard hitting investigative obvious-thing noticing. Well done.
Tear it all down
Thx to nepotism & corruption This started in convents, since Christian convents taught better than Govt schools, people educated through it were preferred, later led to corrupts paying HMs of institutions, seats went to unworthy, lazy headhunters settled 4clg name not performance
May also be more important than competence. All about that bio yo
Nah greatness can’t be taught.
This is obvious
I call it “socioeconomic incest” and it’s destroying this country.
No shit - it’s a mega old boys club network
Captain_Tusk HB your Cambridge? Lol
Duh. And those who are accepted into those universities, blah, blah, blah.