Shooting for the stars

EclectEcon points to Austan Goolsbee's piece on how one's first salary has a big role to play in predicting lifetime earnings.

Eek! My first salary wasn't terrible but is was far from great.....

This paragraph is scary:

"The Stanford class of 1988, for example, entered the job market just after the market crash of 1987. Banks were not hiring, and so average wages for that class were lower than for the class of 1987 or for later classes that came out after the market recovered. Even a decade or more later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered."