The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality

Abstract

We measure college graduate quality -the average human capital of a college's graduates -using the average earnings of the college's graduates adjusted to a common labor market. Our implementation uses the database of the website Glassdoor, which has the necessary information on earnings and education for non-migrants and migrants who graduate from roughly 3,300 colleges in 66 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50 percent more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences. Poorer countries do not just lose a higher share of their skilled workers; their emigrants are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college's students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives, both within and across countries. JEL: O15, O11, J3, J6.

The Effect of Franchise No-Poaching Restrictions on Worker Earnings

“…Martellini, Schoellman and Sockin (2023) compare GD to the US Department of Education's College Scorecard, which derives from tax data. The authors find the distribution of differences between the two data sources "is symmetric, centered near zero, and has small tails" (Martellini, Schoellman and Sockin, 2023). Similarly Sockin (2022) compares industry-occupation means across GD and the CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement, finding a correlation of .92.…”

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“…Karabarbounis and Pinto (2019) find that, conditional on industry or region, the wage distribution in Glassdoor captures the respective distributions obtained from the Quarterly Census for Employment and Wages (QCEW) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); though Karabarbounis and Pinto (2019) note the distribution of employment by industry is not representative -an issue less relevant for this work given the focus on individual firms. Martellini et al (2021) compare the average earnings of graduates by college within Glassdoor with averages produced by the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard from tax data, and conclude that Glassdoor provides an unbiased sample. Additionally, Glassdoor wages have been used to validate results from other data (Derenoncourt et al, 2021).…”