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 examine whether a rising college earnings premium has contributed to increased earnings inequality over the past 50 years. I answer this with a model of college linked to a Ben-Porath human capital problem. The model is estimated from data on college attainment rates and lifecycle income profiles, which I document by education level. I find that lifetime earnings inequality within cohorts has risen significantly since the 1970s but little of this is directly attributable to the college premium. Higher tuition is also not particularly important. Increasing earnings risk seems to be the main driver, with higher college return dispersion a contributing factor.In the second chapter, I look at how unemployment risk affects the earnings distribution and the trajectory of lifetime earnings. I use a lifecycle human capital model where workers accrue both general and career-specific skills and face unpredictable transitory unemployment shocks. Through unemployment's effect on career-specific human capital, I find that unemployment risk explains a seeming contradiction where college graduates' earnings are characterized by high lifecycle dispersion but low year-to-year variation relative to those with less education. As in prior work, I find that variation in total lifetime earnings is mostly driven by differences among people before they enter adulthood, but unemployment risk significantly affects the mean. Moreover, my framework also explains recent findings on the distribution of earnings changes, particularly the notable skew and leptokurtosis. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]