The Prestige

Fan of the movie, not of the ridiculous emphasis of it in the job market. (NY Times article via Mark Thoma)  The article starts off talking about increases in higher education tuition, which can be attributed to a prestige chase - graduates from top schools get most of the attention on the job market, so there's a competition to hire top professors to make your school a "prestigious" top school, boosting professor salaries.  Darn this stupid signalling effect.  If a prestigious school was really tied to fantastic intelligence, I'd buy it, but while there most certainly is a (positive) correlation between the two, I wouldn't say the correlation is 1.  I'd love to do a paper on this, see how much signalling is happening versus how much skill development/initial intelligence is happening, but as anybody who does research on human resource/education can tell you, evaluating skill development/initial intelligence is tough...  If only I was incredibly intelligent and attending an Ivy League school, I'd be able to come up with a devious instrumental variable (*dripping sarcasm*).