>Doug, certainly the averages have increased, but have degrees from lower
>ranking colleges seen much of an increase in value. Many of our graduates
>are doing jobs that high school students might have done a few decades
>ago.
That's almost true by definition, since the share of the labor force with college degrees has grown a lot over the decades. There's a lot to the Bowles/Gintis argument that college grads earn more not because of their great skills, but because the credential is a sign to employers that the worker is a good soldier.
Then there's this (I haven't read the full paper, just this abstract):
>Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An
>Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables
>Stacy Berg Dale, Alan B. Krueger
>
>
>NBER Working Paper No. W7322
>Issued in August 1999
>
>
>---- Abstract -----
>
>
>There are many estimates of the effect of college quality on
>students' subsequent earnings. One difficulty interpreting past
>estimates, however, is that elite colleges admit students, in part,
>based on characteristics that are related to their earnings
>capacity. Since some of these characteristics are unobserved by
>researchers who later estimate wage equations, it is difficult to
>parse out the effect of attending a selective college from the
>students' pre-college characteristics. This paper uses information
>on the set of colleges at which students were accepted and rejected
>to remove the effect of unobserved characteristics that influence
>college admission. Specifically, we match students in the newly
>colleted College and Beyond (C&B) Data Set who were admitted to and
>rejected from a similar set of institutions, and estimate fixed
>effects models. As another approach to adjust for selection bias, we
>control for the average SAT score of the schools to which students
>applied using both the C&B and National Longitudinal Survey of the
>High School Class of 1972. We find that students who attended more
>selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were
>accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less
>selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the
>school is significantly related to the students' subsequent
>earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from
>attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an
>elite college appears to be greater for students from more
>disadvantaged family backgrounds.