Returns to Postgraduate Education: Holding on to a Higher Ground?

Abstract

Postgraduates' relative wages are on the rise despite large increases in the number of workers with such qualifications. In this presentation, we propose an innovative way to measure the importance of different sources of the postgraduates' earnings premium in a context of rapid massification. Using an off-the-shelf non-parametric matching technique, we disentangle two different sources of postgraduates' relative earnings: wage premiums within occupations and the assignment to better paid and more complex occupations. We show that both sources are relevant but the relative importance of the former has been steadily increasing overtime. This evidence suggests that postgraduate degrees have largely worked as a way to avoid falling down the occupational ladder or, in other words, to hold on to a higher ground.