Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Stacy Berg Dale, an associate at the Andrew Mellon Foundation, compared students who entered the most selective schools with those who entered less prestigious schools, beginning in 1976.  One of the students from Tulane, by 1995, had earned a third less than a comparable Yale graduate. (For more information on school and future earnings, please visit, “How Colleges and Salaries Match Up” at /wordpress/) Yet, then Krueger and Dale (K&D henceforth) made a slight adjustment. They took a student who had been admitted to an Ivy school, yet chose to attend a less select school, and discovered that twenty years later, this student had the same income level as others emerging from the Ivy school. A question arose: is it the school or the student who stands at the core of success?