'Underlying the hysteria is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that's plausible—and mostly wrong. "We haven't found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters," says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co- author of "How College Affects Students," an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don't systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don't. On two measures—professors' feedback and the number of essay exams—selective schools do slightly worse.

By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates' lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2 percent to 4 percent for every 100-point increase in a school's average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke. A well-known study by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of Mathematica Policy Research examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.

...[Researchers] studied admissions to one top Ph.D. program. High scores on the Graduate Record Exam helped explain who got in; Ivy League degrees didn't.... One study of students 20 years out found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction. They may have been so conditioned to being on top that anything less disappoints.'