Ivy League Grads Make More Money

IT'S confirmed: If you graduate from an Ivy League college, you'll move up faster and make more money than your counterparts from less-prestigious institutions.

That's the finding of a new study from the Cornell University Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies in Ithaca, N.Y., and Paul Ray Berndtson, an international executive research firm based in Fort Worth, Texas.

How much more will you make? Of the 3,500 senior managers surveyed, Ivy Leaguers earned on average $32,581 more a year. Researchers took into account such variables as ability, age, experience, and university ranking.

Differences in executive salary, however, are not necessarily due to differences in the quality of a school. In addition to the perception that Ivy League schools provide a better-quality education, such schools tend to be more selective in their choice of applicants, says Sharon Voros, spokeswoman for Paul Ray Berndtson.

``A lot of the [Ivy League] graduates ... have important positions in American industry and politics, and there's a lot of networking between ... former graduates and recent graduates,'' she says. The study also found that executives with graduate degrees, regardless of the university, earned on average $9,296 more a year than those without graduate degrees.