College-educated mobsters made more money

In the 1993 gangster film “Carlito’s Way,” the eponymous character, played by Al Pacino, tells his lawyer, Sean Penn, who has become embroiled in a life of crime:

“You ain’t a lawyer no more, Dave. You’re a gangster now. You’re on the other side. Whole new ball game. You can’t learn about it at school, and you can’t have a late start.”

But, as it turns out, Carlito, despite his years of fictional experience as a criminal, may not have known as much about the industry as he thought.

A study released earlier this year looked at the educational levels of the Italian-American mafia between the 1930s and 1960s, by comparing mobsters to data taken from the 1940 U.S. census.

The researchers found that for each year a mobster attended college, their income jumped between 7.5 and 8.5 per cent.

The study compared the results to the results of their neighbours, who on average had one more year of education.

And in contrast, mobsters had only “slightly smaller” returns on education.

In fact, mafia members saw a boost to their income from college that was about twice as large as college-educated Italian immigrants who didn’t join the mob and immigrants in general.

The study found that a specific type of criminal benefitted the most from higher levels of college education, and it wasn’t the bottom-of-the rung thugs, but rather the brains behind more intricate operations.

The mobsters who were involved with complicated criminal schemes, such as embezzlement and bookmaking, had the highest returns on education among their peers.

“What we found was the returns to education were much larger for the business-type of criminals, those that we think need those abilities that you learn in school,” Giovanni Mastrobuoni, one of the authors of the report told Fortune.

“Dealing with numbers, organizing your thoughts, organizing a group, and so on … the ‘soldiers,’ the ones doing the dirty jobs, we find very, very low returns to education.”

So sorry Carlito, turns out book smarts may be valuable on the streets after all.