Does an Elite College Really Pay?

MSN Money reports:

Harvard or Yale can cost a fortune, but the theory goes that the cost will pay off in future earnings. Many who've studied the numbers disagree.

The economist Alan B. Krueger teaches at Princeton University, but in his view, it's probably not worth the money it takes to send your kid there.

Not in terms of future earnings, anyway. Krueger ignited a minor furor when he and Stacy B. Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, concluded in 1998 that elite colleges do not pay off in higher earnings. They only appear to do so, the researchers contended. Krueger and Dale claimed that, in most cases, the higher earnings piled up by graduates of elite schools were attributable to elite individuals, not their college education. In other words, if you're smart enough to get into Princeton, you're smart enough to make a lot of money wherever you go to school.

With higher tuition prices many will start to ask is the price of college really worth it?