MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—Stephen Woodbury, from the Middlebury College Class of 1975, will deliver this year’s D.K. Smith Lecture on Thursday, November 8, at 4:30 p.m. in the Warner Hemicycle. His talk is titled, “Does It Pay to Attend an Elite College or University?” The event is free and open to the public.
Woodbury, who graduated from Middlebury with highest honors in economics, went on to earn an M.S. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s a professor of economics at Michigan State University and senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
The starting point for his talk is that graduates of elite colleges and universities earn far more, on average, than graduates of less prestigious schools. The talk will focus on why this is the case: Did they have more ability to begin with? Did they have advantages that those with less prestigious degrees did not have? Do employers arbitrarily prefer workers with elite degrees to those from other schools? Or do elite colleges really change their students and turn them into more productive workers?
Woodbury will also discuss whether the earnings advantage of those with elite degrees is large enough to compensate for the added expense of an elite education.
Friends and family created the Professor David K. Smith Visiting Economic Lecture Series to honor D.K. Smith, a longtime Middlebury College economics professor, upon his retirement. Professor Smith, a 1942 graduate of Middlebury, passed away in November 2006.
The Warner Hemicycle is in Warner Hall on the Middlebury campus, just off College Street (Route 125).