Academic

It's always a problem for legal scholars to make use of contemporary quantitative work, because it is, for almost all of those scholars (myself included), methodologically inaccessible.  One strategy is to pretend that the econometrics don't matter and to simply evaluate the conclusion based on its trueness, and it is this kind of approach that is either vindicated or tested by the latest Dale and Kreuger article arguing that where you go to college doesn't impact your future earnings.

Of course, that thesis is not true.  I doubt there's an economist alive - Dale and Kreuger included - who, upon reading their work, has encouraged their child to attend the cheapest community college they can find, and after two years, transfer to the cheapest four year institution they can find.  Such preferences will not be revealed, even though the point of the article - and this, too, should raise an eyebrow - is that everybody who thinks there is value in an elite education (that is, everyone who will read the paper) is wrong. 

It's even more obviously not true for law school, of course.  But I do hope that Dale and Kreuger are running the numbers as we speak (better the lowest ranked state school than Yale, right?  Think of the money you'll save, and if you're Yale-quality you'll do just as well as a Yale graduate).

More generally, the paper takes one variant of a personal-merit-is-the-only-thing-that-matters argument that we accept in very few other contexts.  We think, for future earnings, that your parents matter, that your pre-college schooling matters, the quality of your employer matters, that how much you earn in life might turn on whether you happen to graduate during a recession or a boom, whether you marry or don't, how many children you have, where you happen to live, and the career you choose.  We recognize that income is contingent on a myriad number of factors that don't simply turn on the innate character of the earner.  So why would college be any different?

But of course, it's not really a critique that Dale and Kreuger would care about or be able to respond to, which sort of depressingly calls into question the whole point of consuming such work.