Using longitudinal data of college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills--including literacy, numeracy, foreign language, and field-specific skills. Graduates of academic programs and schools of higher reputation obtain higher earnings relative to vocational public programs. A one…

I study the effect of higher education on lifecycle earnings and focus on three ways in which education may help drive earnings: the effect of higher education on one's skills, the effect on one's ability to accumulate new skills in the future, and the relationship between education and one's likelihood of unemployment. In the first chapter, I…

We explore the impact of excess credits, defined as additional credit hours accumulated by students beyond the required number of hours, on labor market outcomes. We consider whether additional credits have any impact on the labor market outcomes of job mismatch and income. Data are taken from the Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) study, a…

Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have under-appreciated the role of cognitive skills. This study uses the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a unique data set that contains information on individual cognitive skills, college majors and earnings to investigate the…

This paper analyzes whether and how attending an internship during tertiary education affects income. We address endogeneity with an IV approach that exploits information regarding whether the internship was a mandatory component of the study. We further address selection into programs with mandatory internship by using the share of mandatory…

We show that educational outcomes of sexual minorities are consistent with efforts to mediate future discrimination. Gay men and lesbians obtain more years of schooling than heterosexual men and women, between 0.6 and 1.2 years. This difference is robust to controlling for observable characteristics for men but not women. Gay men and lesbian women…

Studying abroad may allow students to form human capital in ways not possible at home and may enable them to earn higher incomes. On the other hand, study abroad has been criticized as insufficiently rigorous. Little is known about how study abroad affects skills and earnings in the long term. Using a data set of 3,155 students over a range of…

The outflow of college graduates will damage the accumulation of regional human capital and affect regional economic and social development. This article uses the administrative data of the employment monitoring system for college graduates in a province in central China in 2018 and establishes a multivariate logit model based on the Todaro model,…

Wage differentials across college majors are huge and have been increasing. The type of college education becomes important for college students in terms of future earnings. Understanding the treatment effect of major choice in a certain occupation is difficult because of the sorting behavior and the effect of occupation choice. In order to…

Based on a national scale survey data of 2013 and methods of statistical descriptive and econometric analysis, this paper has given an empirical analysis on the frequency, flowing direction, return and influential factors of college graduates' migration. Meanwhile gender comparison in migration has been analyzed. The empirical results are…

The Great Recession was one of the sharpest economic downturns of the past century, with significant impacts across the U.S. labor market. Over past decades, one key feature of the U.S. labor market has been the high and stable returns to education. In this paper I estimate the returns to education for large samples of young workers in Arkansas…

There is widespread support for expanding access to universities for under-represented groups, such as students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and older students, because of the higher rates of return to university degrees. This study examines whether this assumption holds true for mature-aged graduates who have received their degrees in an…

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, recording a significant increase in higher education enrolments in these two Chinese societies. The massification of higher education in China and Taiwan has inevitably resulted in an oversupply of university graduates, with growing…

This report explains some of the ways the payoff of postsecondary education can be measured and provides insights into why there is confusion about that payoff, despite strong evidence. Focusing on the variation in outcomes across individuals helps to clarify that the existence of the high average payoff, and the reality of significant benefits…

This paper views overschooling as conditions whereby people occupy job positions which are not optimal for their qualifications. The theoretical backings for the paper are the Human Capital, the equity and the two-factor theories of motivation and job satisfaction. Antecedents to overschooling which are mentioned include educational emphasis, the…