一个academic研究的课题是，名校录取是否对学生有作用？
2个hypotheses:
1. 名校是起Signal作用，学生本来就好，但名校并不加成，
2. 名校给学生加成？
区分这2个hypotheses很难。但academic的大数据研究发现名校对中产白人不加成。最有名的研究是
Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion.
Ms. Dale — an economist at Mathematica, a research firm — and Mr. Krueger — a Princeton economist and former contributor to this blog — added a new variable in their research. They also controlled for the colleges that students applied to and were accepted by.
他们在回归分析中加入一个变量，学生是否申请了名校这个变量，无论是否录取。
Doing so allowed them to capture much more information about the students than SAT scores and grades do. Someone who applies to Duke, Williams or Yale may be signaling that he or she is more confident and ambitious than someone with similar scores and grades who does not apply. Someone who is accepted by a highly selective school may have other skills that their scores didn’t pick up, but that the admissions officers noticed.
Once the two economists added these new variables, the earnings difference disappeared. In fact, it went away merely by including the colleges that students had applied to — and not taking into account whether they were accepted
A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to U Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to U Penn.
当然任何东西要看例外，这里的例外是
It’s important to note, though, that a few major groups did not fit the pattern: black students, Latino students, low-income students and students whose parents did not graduate from college. “For them, attending a more selective school increased earnings significantly,” Mr. Krueger has written. Why? Perhaps they benefit from professional connections they would not otherwise have. Perhaps they acquire habits or skills that middle-class and affluent students have already acquired in high school or at home.
所以名校为啥现在要改录取？
除了legacy外，白人，中高产从名校教育没有得到benefit，但黑人娃，拉美娃，低收入娃，第一代娃有好处，所以这就是为啥现在名校改录取的一个大原因。
当然这里亚裔数据很少，结论不一定适合亚裔。也许亚裔也要benefit. 但亚裔收入已经最高，怎么再提高那？
所以如果亚裔申请但没有进入名校的，如果是高收入阶层，可以comfortably不用担心，按照这个研究，娃的收入和去名校收入会一样。
亚裔如果低收入家庭，第一代大学生，应该多申请名校，说不定就进了。