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The Dale-Krueger Study
The 2002 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger demonstrating that students admitted to elite universities but attending less selective ones earn roughly the same as elite attendees — the empirical foundation for signaling theory's dominance.
Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger's 2002 paper Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College produced the single most consequential empirical finding in the economics of higher education: students admitted to highly selective universities but choosing to attend less selective ones earned, over the following two decades, approximately the same as those who attended the elite institutions. The finding supported signaling theory's claim that the admissions filter — not the education — was the primary driver of the earnings premium associated with elite credentials. The study has been replicated and extended across multiple cohorts and remains the empirical anchor for understanding what the university actually sells.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The study addressed a problem that had plagued earlier research on the returns to college selectivity: the observed earnings premium for graduates of elite institutions could be driven either by the institutions' educational contribution or by