What an Ivy League Education Really Gets You

Economists have a new theory of why graduates of top colleges have so much career success.

Excerpt: "So the people who go to the fanciest colleges tend to have the most successful careers—this is not exactly news. The question of why this is the case, however, is surprisingly tricky to answer.

...The Brown University economist John Friedman has studied this question as much as anyone, and he thinks all those theories are missing the point. Friedman, best known for his work on economic mobility with the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, has become convinced that the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections.

It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people. “Being in the classroom with all these folks, doing homework assignments, having to cooperate with them in your club, sitting around the dining table with them, figuring out who’s going to live with whom—all that stuff comes together to make these schools really unparalleled training grounds to be in these upper-echelon professional jobs,” Friedman told me. In other words, what an academically gifted 18-year-old gets from paying Ivy League tuition is exposure to more people like themselves. And it’s worth every penny."