Comparing sample survey measures of English earnings of graduates with administrative data during the Great Recession

Abstract

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How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background

“…This implies that a degree can provide significant protection from unemployment and non employment. Further, Britton et al (2015) found that half of non graduate women had earnings below £8k a year at around age 30, while only a quarter of female graduates were earning less than this, and half were earning more than £21k a year. Similar patterns were observed for males.…”

“…The core of our paper bores into a unique database developed and documented by Britton et al (2015) which was built through the hard linking of anonymised individual level data from the English student loan book, a book owned by the UK's Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and operated by the Student Loan Company (SLC), with the corresponding income tax records held by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax authority. The book starts with new borrowers from 1998 and we look in detail at tax records for the tax years 2008/09 to 2012/13.…”

“…Hence another contribution of this paper is to provide some insight into graduates' earnings growth some years into graduates' careers, rather than just on entry into the labour market as is the case for much of the UK literature. Britton et al (2015) defined the population of English domiciled student loan borrowers and constructed the labour earnings variables for this database, as well as providing English wide summary statistics of earnings (e.g. median earnings in the tax year 2011/12 of English former borrowers who started HE in 1999 and are female).…”

“…We will see that it is important to model both institution and subject. Further, Britton et al (2015) suggested that much of the interesting HE impacts on earnings emerge after the 3 year horizon when postgraduate education and initial career training has largely been completed. Certainly, the diversity of graduate earnings takes a while to emerge, but they are on stark display after ten years when the earnings of some graduate sub-populations are rapidly accelerating.…”

“…Our paper will contribute to this literature by producing evidence on the variation in graduates' earnings and more specifically the relationship between parental income and graduates' outcomes, using far finer grained measures of the exact nature of graduates' higher education than hitherto. This paper also builds on previous work using the same dataset in Britton et al (2015) which focused on describing key features of the distribution of graduates' earnings, and comparing it to that of non graduates. They found that non graduates are twice as likely to have no earnings as graduates, ten years after leaving higher education (30% against 15% respectively for the cohort graduating in 1999 observed in 2011/12).…”