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Comment by nfrankel | Hacker News Reader

> bachelor’s degrees from private colleges, on average, have higher ROI than degrees from public colleges 40 years after enrollment

That's a f... up conclusion if there's one. Let's look at it another way: in those private colleges, you'll likely find more students whose parents are rich than in public colleges. Guess what? After 40 years, there's a higher chance they will find themselves higher in the food chain than students from poorer families.

The only conclusion is the renewal of the capital gap generation after generation.

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Chetty et al [0] came to the opposite conclusion: “...children from low and high income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend.”

[0] http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper...

Read your own link: “We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low- and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobility – the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile – differ substantially across colleges because low-income access varies significantly across colleges with similar earnings outcomes.”

They attend very different schools and have very different results.

GP claimed that earnings outcomes were explained entirely by family wealth, thus implying that poor students attending top-tier universities should not expect to find themselves climbing the socioeconomic ladder. This is evidently false.

The fact that lower-income students have less access to top tier universities has no bearing on the outcomes of the students who do in fact matriculate there.

(Also, accusing others of not reading their own links borders on the uncivil. Keep that out of this forum.)

Isn't that what parent said?

Once you control for college attended, outcomes do not depend sugnificantly on parent incomes; therefore parental income is not a confounding factor in looking at the ROI of collages.

Children of wealthy parents still tend to do better, but that is because they get to purchase a superior product.

The difference is less than 10%. It's not a big deal.

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