Data showing what students earn after attending higher education institutions have become increasingly available, bolstering calls from policymakers and advocates that government financial aid programs should be tied to those outcomes. Often overlooked, however, is that these data and policies usually reflect the earnings of only students who…

Using a unique pan-European dataset, we rely on two alternative measures of over-education and control stepwise for four groups of covariates in order to interpret the over-education wage penalty in light of theoretical models. Firstly, it appears that a significant fraction (i.e. between 1/5 and 1/3) of PhD holders in Europe are genuinely…

Gender pay gaps in earnings are well-documented in the literature. However, new factors contributing to women's lower earnings have emerged and remain under-researched. Educational choices are among them. We use a rich administrative dataset from Poland, a Central Eastern European country with high tertiary education enrolment and high female…

Using data collected from more than 5.8 million high school and college graduates ages 18 to 65 years who participated in the American Community Survey between 2009 and 2021, the authors estimate the internal rates of return (IRRs) for individuals with college degrees in 10 broad majors compared with high school graduates. The analysis shows…

In the discipline of technical/professional writing and communication, one of the strongest recruiting tools we use is the potential earning power students will have once they obtain a degree and secure a job in the industry. This article is the result of two professors learning that one of their most advanced and dedicated students accepted, in…

This study provides new evidence of the gender wage gap among recent university graduates at different stages of their early career. Using a unique administrative dataset from Russia, we estimate the gender wage gap at means and across wage distribution for a cohort of 2018 university graduates during the first 4 years after graduation. We explore…

Purpose: The article aims to describe the role of training and examines the impact on the wages of university and college graduates. Design/methodology/approach: We use nationwide administrative data on university and college graduates in 2019. The population includes 1.3 million observations, of which 222,000 ([approximately] 16%) received…

This study measures college quality by the amount by which the college adds to the salary of its students above what the median market value would be for the same majors and student quality. Commonly used national rankings of colleges such as U.S. News and World Report or Forbes are heavily biased by a college's average salaries and the quality of…

The aim of this study is to analyse the differences in employability among Spanish graduates from public or private universities. Private and public universities do not usually have the same profile. In a scenario in which private universities are becoming increasingly important, with mainly high-income students, a greater employability of their…

Recent higher education accountability policies and proposals have often linked programs' or institutions' federal aid access to students' postcompletion earnings. But proposals differ regarding when to measure earnings. Policymakers may want to know how fast earnings typically grow and when in an individual's career earnings growth rates change.…

As the cost of living continues to increase over time, many Americans are placing greater scrutiny on the financial choices they make. An area for such evaluation is if the outcomes of going to college continue to be worth the cost. One underrepresented group, first-generation college students (FGCS), is less likely than non-FGCS to attend and…

This study contributes theoretically and empirically to our understanding of students' transition from work placement to the graduate labour market, by exploring earning differentials due to heterogeneous job transitions. We developed a theoretical framework that underpins the relationships between work placement, job transition and graduate…

Is law school worth it? A Juris Doctor (JD) offers high median earnings and a substantial earnings boost relative to a bachelor's degree in the humanities or social sciences--two of the more common fields of study that lawyers pursue as undergraduate students. However, graduates of most law schools carry substantial student loan debt, which dims…

The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China's national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to…

Background/Context: Students designated as English Learners (ELs) account for 10.4 percent of all students nationwide but have historically been provided unequal access to educational resources (Gándara et al., 2003; National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). Further, education policies are often blind to ELs' strengths and challenges,…