By James Pethokoukis

Being a successful criminal isn’t easy. There’s a great SNL video called “That’s the Game” where a drug dealer named Quan (Chris Redd) decides to push out his partner Dante (Kenan Thompson) — until he suffers a panic attack when he learns just how difficult it is running a criminal organization. As Dante describes the duties of boss:

Quan, you are not ready for this. . . . You got a lawyer setting up shell companies to hide the cash? . . . And you know about supply-side economics? Because you can’t flood the market after all. . . . Then you gotta weigh earnings against overhead. . . . Of course, you gotta project seasonality and market trends, right? So even though it’s quarter four right now, you’re setting up for quarter two of next year . . .

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that a college education would be helpful for a criminal aiming to run a large enterprise. Consider mobster Michael Corleone, one of the most infamous (fictional) attendees of Dartmouth College. And while his brothers may have thought being an Ivy League “college boy” was a waste of time, it probably wasn’t. From the 2016 study, “Returns to education in criminal organizations: Did going to college help Michael Corleone?” (thanks to Wharton’s Ethan Mollick for the Twitter pointer):

We use as a case study one of the longest running criminal corporations in history: the Italian-American mafia. Its most successful members were capable businessmen, orchestrating crimes that required abilities that might be learned at school: extracting the optimal rent when setting up a racket, weighting interests against default risk when starting a loan sharking business or organizing supply chains, logistics and distribution when setting up a drug dealing system. We address this question by comparing mobsters to a variety of samples drawn from the United States 1940 Population Census, including a sample of their closest (non-mobster) neighbors. We document that mobsters have one year less education than their neighbors on average. We find that mobsters have significant returns to education of 7.5–8.5%, which is only slightly smaller than their neighbors and 2–5 percentage points smaller than for U.S.-born men or male citizens. Mobster returns were consistently about twice as large as a sample of Italian immigrants or immigrants from all origin countries. Within that, those charged with complex crimes including embezzlement and bookmaking have the highest returns. We conclude that private returns to education exist even in the illegal activities characterized by a certain degree of complexity as in the case of organized crime in mid-twentieth century United States.

Whether a kid dreams of being a mob boss or something more legit, the college decision is a pretty important one. I would check out a really great Q&A from last summer on successfully making that decision between AEI scholars Rick Hess and Beth Akers. They discuss Akers’ book Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education.

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