Escaping the Elite Illusion

As part of the lecture series “First-Hand Information on Economic Policy”, ZEW Mannheim, in collaboration with the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim, invites you to attend a talk by Nobel Laureate Joshua Angrist on 27 March 2025, from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Angrist, from the MIT Economics Department, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2021 for his outstanding contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

At ZEW Mannheim, he will deliver a lecture on education policy:

“Escaping the Elite Illusion”

Many parents believe that an education at selective schools and universities like legendary MIT (where superheroes Ironman and Spiderman went to college) is the key to economic success. Parents and kids go to extraordinary lengths to gain admission into these ivory towers. But the seemingly-obvious return to elite education is often an illusion: an elite illusion. This talk unravels the elite illusion and shows how not to be fooled by it.

We would like to thank the ZEW Sponsors’ Association and the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224 of the German Research Foundation for their support of this event.

Attendance is by invitation only. Please contact us at event@zew.de, if you are interested.