The Wall Street Journal tackles this question today, both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the latter, it points to HumanCapitalScore.com, an interesting-sounding site that, the WSJ reports, "will generate a 10-year range of students' likely postgraduation income based on their test scores, high school and college attended, grades and major.?? Developed by People Capital, New York, a peer-lending concern, as a tool to predict students' creditworthiness, the calculator can also be used to compare the likely outcome of various possible choices of colleges and majors. It makes projections based on data sets from more than a half-dozen government and private-sector sources, encompassing hundreds of thousands of actual grads. Prices start at $19.95 to compare two scenarios."
The cost deterred me from test-driving it myself-but is there a K-12 application here? Might some students find it motivating to know if improving their high school GPA has a big impact on their likely earnings?
The article also closes with this fascinating nugget, dating to a 1999 National Bureau of Economic Research study:
What matters more [than attending a top school], it seems, is graduates' personal drive. In a surprising twist, a stronger predictor of income is the caliber of the schools that reject you. Researchers found students who applied to several elite schools but didn't attend them-presumably because many were rejected-are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools. In a summary of the findings, the Bureau says that "evidently, students' motivation, ambition and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success than average academic ability of their classmates.
So don't feel too badly about those rejection letters-
--Eric Osberg
