In general, the researchers found that attending an elite college (versus a "very competitive" college) did not in fact increase earnings in a statistically significant way. But as economist Robin Hanson notes, this summary finding obscures a very important (and statistically significant) underlying dynamic.
Men who attend the most competitive colleges [according to Barron's 1982 ratings] earn 23 percent more than men who attend very competitive colleges, other variables in the equation being equal.
[But] attending a college with higher SAT scores clearly lowered the wages of women 17-26 years after starting college (in 1976) — a school with a 100-point higher average SAT score reduced earnings by about 6-7%!...
One obvious explanation is that women at more elite colleges married richer classmate men, and so felt less need to earn money themselves. Why don’t the study’s authors want us to hear about that?Hanson is obviously a bit peeved at what he perceives as misleading reporting by the study's authors, who don't mention this divergence in the abstract to their paper. I don't blame him at all, and the omission of this finding is definitely a bit curious.
For me, though, the finding is not terribly surprising. The simple fact is, for various reasons, intelligent and hard-working women do not always WANT the high-powered, high-paid jobs that the elite colleges tend to funnel them into (banking, consulting, etc.). Those jobs often require very long hours a significant amount of travel (not to mention minimal schedule flexibility), and family dynamics and realities make those jobs difficult propositions for married women. This dynamic is especially true when the woman's husband already has a similar type of job, as is of course often the case for graduates of elite universities--it's tough to raise a family when both parents spend tons of time away from home. That last dynamic is likely what accounts for the difference between "elite" and "very competitive" colleges--that is to say, it's not about the woman, so much as it's about her husband.
I definitely don't mean to suggest that women who attend Harvard or Princeton or Stanford do so in the explicit hopes of finding a meal-ticket husband and retiring to the home. Though I did meet several women like that during my college years, their numbers are not sufficient to produce a finding as significant as the Princeton paper uncovered. More likely, family dynamics are very real, whether as a result of chauvinistic men wanting to push their wives into the kitchen or simply a woman's inherent desire to bond with her children.
Either way, the study's findings have to be troubling for feminists who fought for so long to achieve equality in the classroom and the office. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of feminism's greatest legacies has been to create a tremendous sense of confusion among women and their role. Much of our society still values their ability (and rewards their willingness) to be warm, nurturing figures, which makes them a natural fit for child-rearing. But the classroom and the office reward the opposite, and women are caught in between.
The results of this study are definitely a bit difficult to fully sort out, but so too are all issues in the realm of gender inequity. It's hard to know where personal choice ends and institutional discrimination begins, which is what makes this study's findings so perplexing. Are the women choosing the lower-paying jobs, or are they bizarrely being forced into them? Could it be that the workplace punishes women for having gone to an elite university? Or is Robin Hanson's initial explanation on the money? It could be that all of these things are true, but it'll take a completely different kind of study to find out.
[Overcoming Bias]
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