[msellout]

What effect do you think that has?

If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.

If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.