The article talks about how students who went to elite Indian collegs perform similiar to students who went to low tier colleges in standardized exit tests wich is apparently a thing in India.
The only issue is, students don't take any standardized exit tests in India. Which makes the whole paper pointless.
I went some digging to see what data this paper is using. Apparently this is what I found out.
> All students in colleges (private or public) affiliated with the same university take the same exit exams. These exams vary by stream of education, but conditional
on the stream, private and public college students study the same curriculum and take the same exit tests.
> I obtained administrative data from colleges in a district in North India and the university with which they were affiliated.
The issue with using this data is that almost none of elite colleges in India are affliated to some University. They are their own University. So apparently the data of the paper doesn't include any elite colleges! Kind of ironic given the title of the paper "Prestige Matters: Wage Premiumand Value Addition in Elite Colleges"
> students don't take any standardized exit tests in India
From the article:
> There, pupils in their final year of secondary school sit a leaving exam known as the Senior Secondary School Examination.
(Emphasis mine.)
There is a bit of a mistake here. There isn't any one Senior Secondary School Examination, but many. Some of them are standardized at the state level, and I know of two which are standardized across the country, the largest of which is the CBSE. I assume this mistake is from the Economist, since the abstract of the paper itself says "Admission to the elite public colleges is based on the scores obtained in the Senior Secondary School Examinations" (emphasis mine). Going through the "data" archive linked on the paper's page, I see references to the CBSE, which makes it likely that that was the standardized test the author considered. The CBSE is, by definition, a standardized exit test for secondary school students in India.
> am actually amused this article was based on an research paper published by Universitry of Virginia
I was referring to the exit test scores that is used by the author for comparing students who goto elite vs normal college. See my updated comment above.
The only issue is, students don't take any standardized exit tests in India. Which makes the whole paper pointless.
I went some digging to see what data this paper is using. Apparently this is what I found out.
> All students in colleges (private or public) affiliated with the same university take the same exit exams. These exams vary by stream of education, but conditional on the stream, private and public college students study the same curriculum and take the same exit tests.
> I obtained administrative data from colleges in a district in North India and the university with which they were affiliated.
The issue with using this data is that almost none of elite colleges in India are affliated to some University. They are their own University. So apparently the data of the paper doesn't include any elite colleges! Kind of ironic given the title of the paper "Prestige Matters: Wage Premiumand Value Addition in Elite Colleges"