Recent academic research has shown that a person’s lifetime income (a very rough measure of professional success) is more highly correlated with the best college that person COULD have gotten into than with the college s/he ACTUALLY attended. For example, two students with 1500 SATs and a 4.0 GPA who both got accepted at Harvard and San Diego State – with one choosing to go to one school and the other choosing the other – on average don’t show statistically different lifetime incomes. Again, this is on average. Kids from Harvard don’t do well because they go to Harvard; they do well because they’re the type of kids that can get into Harvard in the first place. That is, most of them are smart, disciplined and driven. The fact that they choose one college over the other doesn’t change these personal characteristics.
Personally, I wouldn’t spend money on Bishop’s or Harvard or any other highly tauted private school unless the amount I was spending was so small relative to my income as to be meaningless. But that’s just me.
