The Indelible Bonobo Experience

The more elite a school, the better its alums’ paychecks. The effect also increased over time. Among students who had graduated high school in 1980, those who had gone on to a top private university eventually made 20 percent more than their counterparts from bottom tier public school. For the class of 1972, the wage boost was just 9 percent. (via Atlantic)

..social stratification begins earlier, though..

• But studies since have still detected a similar pattern. In 2000, aDepartment of Education report found that, overall, the quality of a college decided 2-to-3 percent of earnings among men and 4-to-6 percent in women — making it less important than how they actually performed in class. But in some cases, the effect was much larger. Men who went to an institution that was one standard deviation better on its quality measures saw their salaries jump 8.1 percent. For women, the boost was 17.4 percent.
• One of the best known efforts was by Stacy Berg Dale of the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Alan Kreuger of Princeton, who came to the unexpected conclusion that, in some respects, where you went to college was less important than where you applied. 
• Selectivity didn’t matter. Academic siblings ended up making just about the same wages after college regardless of how choosy their school was. In fact, where the students applied, and their final class rank in school, were much better correlated with earnings than their school’s admissions standards. If you were smart enough to get into Yale, or even take a shot at it, you were probably smart enough to earn like a Yale grad.
• Although tough admissions standards didn’t count for much, tuition prices did. Students who went to more expensive schools consistently outearned their peers during life after college.
• In a 2009 paper, Texas A&M professor Mark Hoekstra used a somewhat simpler experiment to try and solve the elite college question. Enrolling at the flagship increased wages by 20 percent, a divide illustrated vividly in the chart below.
• Not all of a college’s graduates will earn the same. A student’s grades, major, and innate talent all make a difference. Professors at the University of Texas at Dallas, University of Tulsa, and Cornell have tried to capture that dynamic in a new working paper that looks at the range of wages earned by students who went to college in Texas between 1996 and 2002. 
• So speaking very broadly, better schools yield bigger paychecks. But does that mean they’re always worth the price? Bloomberg Businessweek has teamed up with Payscale, which collects self-reported earnings data from its users, to estimate the return on investment for more than 500 colleges. Topping the list: MIT, with lifetime ROI of about $1.8 million for graduates, or 12.6 percent a year. It’s followed closely by fellow elite engineering school, Cal Tech.