Opinion: Rejected by a top-tier college? Don’t worry, it won’t hurt your chances for future success

There is nervousness in the homes of ambitious American high school students awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. Their remarkable report, a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper titled “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College,” examined 14,239 students at 30 colleges, ranging from the most selective, including Yale and Swarthmore, to less selective places like Denison University and Penn State. Dale and Krueger found that those who attended more selective schools did “not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges.” They concluded that “unobserved characteristics,” such as persistence, humor and warmth, might have influenced success in life as measured by salary, but getting into the pickiest schools did not. “So if you know very bright, hard-working students who feel like they have to ‘settle for’ Purdue because they were turned down by Northwestern or Notre Dame,” Becker said, “point out to them that they’ll have as many top-5% math students in their freshman class at Purdue as the other two universities put together.” Becker also points out a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education on employers’ priorities when choosing applicants just out of college.