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  • college selectivity Final resubmission 090518

    Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Labour Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Labour Economics, 53, 2018 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.05.005

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    Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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University selectivity and the relative returns to higher education: Evidence from the UK

Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>08/2018
<mark>Journal</mark>Labour Economics
Volume53
Number of pages20
Pages (from-to)230-249
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date16/05/18
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We study the wage outcomes of university graduates by course (i.e. by subject and institution) using the UK Labour Force Surveys (LFS). We show that the selectivity of undergraduate degree programmes plays an important role in explaining the variation in the relative graduate wages. In fact, we find that much of the variation in relative wages across courses is due to the quality of students selected. Once we allow for course selectivity in our analysis we find that our estimates of the effects of attending the most prestigious HEIs is around 10 percentage points lower than otherwise; the effects of attending the middle ranking HEIs is around 5 percentage points lower; and that of attending these lowest ranking HEIs is unaffected. We go on to consider selection (on observables) into subjects and institutions using the Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjusted (IPWRA) method to estimate multiple treatment effects.

Bibliographic note

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Labour Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Labour Economics, 53, 2018 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.05.005