Kevin Drum engages in what appears to be a meaningless critique of an academic paper’s conclusion. The paper, by Jack Mara, Lewis Davis and Stephen Schmidt, concerns how membership in a fraternity or a sorority during college, or lack thereof, affects grades and post-graduation financial success. Here’s the paper’s results and conclusion:
We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four – point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. …
Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.
Kevin thinks the result is backward:
I’d argue exactly the opposite: this paper puts another nail in the coffin of fraternities and sororities and eating clubs and so forth. Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:
Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.
And I think the intellectual confusion present in both conclusions is really reigning supreme. First of all, colleges exist to educate citizens, not to increase their financial earnings. A financially successful person does not define the successful citizen in the eyes of society, otherwise we’d all be praising Al Capone[1].
Second, from an individual’s perspective, using financial earnings as a proxy for success in life is well documented as a red herring.
Third, it’s a mistake to consider using such a trivial metric as financial success as, well, being a business success. There are many examples of senior executives who basically burn down their firms, but they walk away with immense amounts of money. There is no apparent attempt in to correct for the mismatch between financial success and real-world success.
I would entertain arguments that such a mismatch is illusory, but I think that such an argument would stray into solipsism, always an intellectual error of elephantine proportions when attempting to evaluate across a collection of individuals.
And then there’s the constraints of the survey, starting with it being one college. And then:
3,762 alumni responded to the survey, a response rate of 25.8%. The survey asked respondents for information about their demographic characteristics, college activities, academic achievement, and current work status and income. In the analysis below, we limit the sample to men under the age of 65 who are employed full-time and for whom all of the control variables are present, resulting in 1,667 observations.
Men only? Under 65? Why even consider questions of success of any kind before the age of 65? This sort of strikes me as madness.
