>> Your argument was based on a premise that students who are admitted via merit to elite schools do not actually benefit by attending these elite schools

> No that is not at all what my argument is. My argument is (quoting from a previous comment)

> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students

In support of the above statement, you made this statement:

> Studies show that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend. In other words, the admissions itself serves as an indication that this person is top-notch and capable of great things.

Everything else you assert would seem to follow from this assertion of yours which is immediately above. You have provided no evidence for this claim, however, other than as measured in financial terms.

> However, if you read the study (which you clearly did not), it is actually talking solely about Ivy League schools not any 'elite college'.

OMG. You are too much!

This is the actual study:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322

It has absolutely nothing to do with Ivy League schools. From the paper itself, it is about "elite" schools (in the paper's own words), and eliteness was measured largely using "selectivity (as measured by the school's average SAT score) and net tuition".

> Actually, if you didn't read the study at all, but had only clicked the link and read the title (as most HNers are apt to do), then you still would have known it's about the Ivy League

:facepalm:

Even in the summary article you linked to it says, "or other super elite college".

> You are attempting to attack the study

I am not attacking the study. I am stating that "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things" (your terms) and financial earnings cannot be equated.

It's a tautology that they cannot be equated, but it would be a long and expensive philosophical, psychological, and sociological/anthroplogical slog to attempt to prove that they are not very strongly correlated. But the burden of proof is not on me; it is on you. It is you who are claiming that a study that only looks at income somehow can be extended to a larger context of "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things".

> by giving your own anecdote about your experience at MIT. Attempting to extrapolate global truth from your anecdote
> argument is yet another instance of logical fallacy.

I provided an example of benefiting that is divorced from financial gain. Only a single instance of such in the entire world is enough to refute the claim that financial gain and benefit can be equated.

> However, even admitting your use of fallacy as an actual argument, the argument itself would fail to actually refute the study, because again -- as a non-Ivy League school -- the 'success multiplier' of an MIT education has nothing to do with that of an Ivy League one.

This is a strange hole you want to dig yourself into. What is so different about Ivy League schools from other elite colleges and universities? Nothing except that Ivy League schools are all in the same football league. Schools (both elite and non-elite) are all different from each other. Which is one of the reasons that we have lots of them. So that students can attend a school that matches their abilities, interests, and disposition.

Not to mention that if you had actually followed your own advice and actually read the study, you'd know that it says nothing about Ivy League schools in particular.

> I suggest you go back to my first comment and replace the word top school with 'Ivy League schools'

I suggest that you follow your own advice and read studies that you cite as evidence for your arguments.

>> This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.

> That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but is actually orthogonal to the one you are continuing to make about 'elite schools'.

How so? My position is that elite schools can provide significant benefits that cannot be measured financially. This assertion is certainly true. As to whether such benefits frequently exceed such benefits from less elite schools: I clearly am in no position to perform the kind of study that "proving" this would require. I can speak about my personal experience, however, which informs my beliefs on the matter.

>> Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.

>Well... no.

Well, YES!

> An argument based on false premise is false.

That is just wrong. There is no such thing as a "false" argument. You can make no conclusion about the truth of the conclusions of an argument that is based on a false premise. An argument is "valid" if its conclusions follow from its premises and "invalid" if its conclusions do not follow from its premises. An argument is "sound" if it is valid and its premises are true, and unsound if it is either invalid or if it has a false premise.

A sound argument necessarily has true conclusions.

> In mathematics, unsoundness is a property of a logical system, not particular statements in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness

That's a different usage of the term "soundness". Words can mean different things in different contexts. I should think that you would know this.

These links will help inform you about how the term "sound" is typically used by philosophers and logicians in the context of logically deductive arguments:

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sound_argument

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/281208/what-is-the-...

https://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/