Abstract
The wage earned by college graduates over that earned by high school graduates is often described as perhaps the major incentive to get a college education. Although wages of college and high school graduates vary widely, when using large nationally based surveys to compare people who finished school at the same time, we find on average college graduates earn more than high school graduates. There are, of course, many exceptions where individual high school graduates earn more than college graduates, but, as a rough approximation, it has been true for men that the college wage premium averages 50 percent of the high school graduate wage.1The premium typically increases over the career so that when we restrict calculations to recent graduates, we find smaller college—high school graduate differentials than those found when we compare men at midcareer. The premium also varies through time.
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