With the baseball season started and the tax season finished, it is time for the final rite of spring: Where to send the college deposit check.? That is the dilemma facing many families of high school seniors who have been accepted to multiple places.

Economics can help.

Suppose you are fortunate enough to have a child who has gotten into one of the country’s 30 or so super-elite colleges — the likes of the Ivies, Chicago, Duke, Stanford, MIT, Pomona, Rice, and especially Amherst (my alma mater).

The total costs at these schools are around $50,000, though most students pay less, thanks to financial aid packages. But public universities cost much less and the best of them — UCLA and Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, maybe Wisconsin and Texas — are every bit as good as the best private places, and often have real football teams, too.? A bright young thing might also be offered an academic scholarship from a school with a lesser reputation. So the question is: Will going to the $50,000 school translate into making enough more money over time to justify the cost? (For the purposes of this article, non-economic factors are not taken into consideration.)

To start, the obvious assumption is true: People who go to elite colleges on the whole make more money than those who don’t. But that doesn’t mean much: The qualities that get you into Amherst are also valued in the workplace; moreover, the elites tend to have very few dropouts, who can drag down average earnings.

When payscale.com asked graduates to report their earnings, a lot of familiar names are at the top of the list - Dartmouth, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Harvard and Stanford reported the highest mid-career median earnings:

But that doesn’t really answer the question of whether going to Dartmouth pays off compared to going somewhere else. A 1998 study on the subject got a lot of attention. Economists Alan Kreuger and Stacey Dale looked at more than 14,000 people who had started at elite colleges (as defined by SAT scores)? in 1976, and compared their earnings 19 years later to those who had applied to the elite but gone elsewhere. The math is not easy, but in simple terms, what they found, in effect, is that it didn’t matter where students went as long as they were capable of going to the elite colleges.

As Kreuger explained it:

Our research found that earnings were un

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