College entrance examination and income truth: children's ability comes more from the family

Children's abilities, in addition to individual efforts, actually come to a large extent from the family. Parents should have discovered that it is not the children who really cannot lose at the starting line, but themselves.

This year, the admission score lines of all levels of the college entrance examination and the children's results have come out, and parents and children have also completed filling in the voluntary selection of majors. I used to fill in the volunteer first and then take the exam, and I was very envious of the current system. But I am also relatively lucky, there are only more than 800,000 college students graduated in 1997, and it is easy to find employment, and now more than 10 million college students are graduating in a year, and employment has become a problem.

In the past, everyone said that "going to college changes your destiny", but now there are far fewer people who think so. China's rich have graduated from few prestigious universities and many ordinary universities, and many have not even gone to college. In the eyes of ordinary people, most people's income and achievements have little to do with university rankings. Of course, there is also a general feeling that having a good dad is more helpful for employment and development than going to a good university. Is there any truth to these perceptions? Today I will answer this soul question: Is it worth squeezing out the head to go to a prestigious school?

Professor Li Hongbin, who used to work at Tsinghua University, and his collaborators studied this problem in detail. One way to do this is to simply compare the income of students from prestigious and non-prestigious schools when they graduate. The average income of students in elite schools is 26% higher than that of ordinary college students, but most of this gap can be explained by students' college entrance examination scores, major, university city, personal characteristics and family background, such as gender, parents' income, father's education level, etc. After considering this, the additional income of graduates from elite schools fell to 11%. Upon further analysis, this extra income can be explained entirely by English grades, student leadership, and internship experience. This tells the children who are about to go to college to learn English well, socialize more, and practice more.

Another important finding of the study was that girls earned an average of 22 percent more after attending elite schools than at regular colleges, and that a well-educated father could help raise a child's income by 8 percent.

However, the main disadvantage of this method is that the scope of comparison is too wide, and a small number of top students in elite schools can increase the average income, but this is not the credit of elite school education itself. One way to reflect the value of elite schools themselves is to compare the income of students who are in a small range of admission scores (such as a 20-zone range of admission lines) at the time of graduation.

Because the scores are close, there is little difference in the ability of these students, and some go to prestigious schools and some go to ordinary universities due to voluntary filling in or city preferences. Using this methodology, an analysis of graduates from 2010 to 2015 found that attending elite schools can increase earnings by an average of 30-35%. In this way, it is still very worthwhile to squeeze the head and enter a prestigious school. Entering a prestigious school does not guarantee that you will become Jack Ma and Ma Huateng, but there is a high probability that you will have a better life than others. However, the high income brought by prestigious schools does not mean that graduates have more opportunities to enter the "elite" in the eyes of society, such as government departments, state-owned enterprises, banks, get big city hukou, etc., but having a good father can greatly improve this opportunity.

However, this method still has some flaws, and the 20 divisions below the admission line are actually not small, and it is difficult to say that people in this range are close to each other. If only a gap of one or two points is reasonable, the reason why the comparison range is relaxed is because in order to really enter a prestigious school, the score must be a large cut above the admission line.

The most reasonable way to compare is, of course, to let the same person go to a prestigious school and an ordinary university at the same time, and then compare the income after graduation, but this is obviously unrealistic under the Chinese college entrance examination system. But as mentioned below, in the United States, there are ways to implement this idea by a workaround.

The above mentioned is only the income gap at the time of graduation, 5 years after graduation, 10 years after the income data shows that whether you can "gold list title" is a huge watershed in life. Crossing a score line, the higher the college entrance examination score, the higher the future income; Below a score line, regardless of the score, the future income is similar. This sounds helpless, but in fact, it has long been perceived by everyone, and now it has been confirmed by big data.

Now many Chinese dolls are rolled abroad, Chinese parents do not hesitate to be "tiger parents and tiger mothers", academic and sports training is not behind, other Asian families are also "fighting dolls", so that the surrounding white families are afraid that their children will be rolled up, they have moved. But to be honest, white parents who have realized the "American dream" also spared no expense for their children. Nowadays, the annual tuition fee plus living expenses of private universities are as high as 100,000 US dollars, but as long as you look at the data, the average income of graduates of famous schools such as Ivy League is significantly higher than that of ordinary college students, and it is worth it for parents to work hard!

However, income is affected by too many factors, and it is particularly difficult to clearly distinguish the value of prestigious schools, personal ability, and family influence. Two American professors, Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, brainteasers came up with a new way to figure out the true value of prestigious schools, and they collected a large amount of personal information about students when they were admitted, as well as personal information about them when they graduated and more than 30 years later. Many people have the same SAT scores, but some go to prestigious schools, some are rejected to ordinary universities, and some are admitted to prestigious schools and ordinary universities at the same time, but choose to give up prestigious schools, possibly because of proximity to home or low tuition, go to ordinary universities.

Comparing the income of these three types of people when they graduated and more than 30 years later, there was a result that shocked everyone's jaws: for most of the students in the sample, there was no difference in income between attending prestigious schools or ordinary universities. Only children from low-income families and minorities can get additional benefits from elite schools.

In the vernacular, what determines the future income and achievements of a person who can be admitted to a prestigious school is his or her own ability (or parents' background). It doesn't matter if he goes to a cow school or an ordinary school, the college entrance examination does not determine fate. They really achieved that "as long as it is gold, it will shine everywhere", even if this "gold" may be the credit of their parents. Calm down and think about it, this result is actually quite reasonable. China may well be the same, but we don't have the conditions to conduct such a comparative study.

If for most people who can enter the elite school, the elite school itself does not bring additional economic value. The question is, why are parents still flocking to prestigious schools? After all, such discoveries will become household names in the United States through media publicity (at least for families with children facing further education).

After Professor Ge Suqin of Florida Institute of Technology and his collaborators expanded the data, they further found that for boys, the conclusion that this prestigious school does not bring additional economic value still holds, and parents may flock to it just to break into celebrity circles, pursue social prestige, and obtain non-economic value. Of course, there are other possibilities, such as parents overestimating their children's abilities and underestimating the important role SAT scores play in admissions, comparing the income gap that children may receive from regular colleges and elite schools. Another possibility is that the current famous American schools have changed greatly compared with the data sample era in terms of affecting income.

But girls are different, and attending a school with an admission score 100 points higher than the national average increases their chances of continuing to graduate school by 5 percentage points, their earnings increase by 14 percentage points, but their marriage rate drops by 4 percentage points. Once married, they were 8 percentage points more likely to be with a husband with a higher degree (and income) than the average woman. This finding is similar to China, where Chinese women graduate from elite universities with an average income of 22% more than ordinary universities.

To sum up, elite women who graduate from elite American schools usually work longer hours, marry later, and have children later, so it is natural that they earn more.

To sum up, children's abilities, in addition to personal efforts, actually come to a lot from the family. Parents should have discovered that it is not the children who really cannot lose at the starting line, but themselves!

There must be people who want to know the difference in value creation between domestic and foreign famous schools, and simply comparing the average graduation income or career development of the two is not completely scientific. Now, it's not hard to find enough students to be admitted to both, but choose to go to one of the top schools, and when they graduate, such a comparison can be made. We look forward to interested readers completing such research and sharing it with you.

Original Summer Spring FT Chinese Network