Estimating the lifetime returns to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees

背景高等教育(HE)的选择对学生和政府都很重要。对于学生来说，现在英国本科毕业时的债务通常超过5万英镑，而仅研究生学费一年就可能超过2万英镑。以前的研究估计，在英国，本科学位平均为毕业生的终生收入增加约20万英镑(Walker和朱，2011)，但最近的研究表明，这些终生回报可能会因专业和院校选择而显著不同。与此同时，研究生学历的回报仍然被人们理解得很差。对于政府来说，了解终身回报在不同程度上的变化对民众的福利和高等教育系统的设计都有意义。学位的长期影响决定了纳税人补贴学生贷款的长期成本，以及对政府税收和福利支付的重大影响。目的我们有两个首要目标：增加对高等教育学位在整个生命周期中的个人和社会回报的理解，并推进关于收入动态模型的学术文献。我们将使用新获得的纵向教育结果(LEO)数据来估计特定学科和特定机构的本科生和研究生学位对毕业生整个生命周期收入的影响。将高等教育视为一个单一实体，在不同程度上掩盖了回报的重要差异，而关注早期职业生涯结果，则忽略了不同教育轨迹对毕业生整个职业生涯收入轨迹的影响。通过估计特定学位在生命周期中的回报，我们将能够展示这些选择如何影响不同年龄段的收入；识别提供收入突变保险的学位；以及学位如何影响毕业生收入从收入或失业冲击中恢复的弹性。我们将利用丰富的行政数据来开发灵活的收入动态模型，并使用这些模型来模拟最近一批毕业生的终身收入。除了Leo的数据外，我们还获得了新的访问权限，可以访问以前队列中的税务记录，这些记录为1200多万人提供了10多年的收入历史，直到45岁左右。这一带有长长收益面板的大型数据集使我们能够估计比以往更灵活的收益动态模型。我们将调查不同类型的学生的收入持续性和对宏观经济冲击的弹性如何不同，从而扩展现有的收入动态知识并提高终身收入模拟的准确性。我们将结合这些模拟的收入概况与IFS的税收和福利模拟器以及学生贷款偿还模型来估计学位对终身税收、学生贷款支付和福利收入的影响。这将显著改善对不同高等教育学位的更广泛社会回报的估计，并使我们能够估计税收、福利和学生贷款制度在不同程度上对私人回报的影响。好处更好地衡量不同高等教育学位的回报和公共财政影响将使选择教育路线的学生和决定如何确定该部门资金目标的政府受益。我们的工作还将通过突出不同本科生和研究生课程回报的差异，以及通过研究收益动态的差异来促进对更广泛回报的理解，从而对高等教育回报的学术文献做出重大贡献。我们开发的终身收益方法也将有利于未来的学术和政策重点项目，使用LEO来调查政策的长期影响。

ContextHigher Education (HE) choices are important for both students and governments. For students, debt on graduation from undergraduate degrees in England now typically exceeds £50,000, while postgraduate tuition fees alone can be more than £20,000 a year. Previous research has estimated that an undergraduate degree in the UK adds around £200,000 on average to a graduate's lifetime earnings (Walker and Zhu, 2011), but more recent work implies that these lifetime returns may differ dramatically by subject and institution choice. Meanwhile, the returns to postgraduate qualifications are still only poorly understood.For governments, understanding the variation in lifetime returns to different degrees has implications for both the welfare of the population and the design of the HE system. The long-run impact of degrees determines the long-run cost of taxpayer subsidy of student loans, as well as having a significant impact on government tax receipts and benefit payments.AimsWe have two overarching objectives: to increase understanding of the individual and social returns to HE degrees over the entire lifecycle, and to advance the academic literature on modelling earnings dynamics.We will estimate impact of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in specific subjects and from specific institutions on the earnings of graduates over the whole lifecycle using the newly available Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data. Treating HE as a single entity masks important variation in returns to different degrees, while focusing on early career outcomes misses the effect of different educational tracks on the trajectory of earnings throughout graduates' careers. By estimating the returns to specific degrees over the lifecycle, we will be able to show how these choices affect earnings at different ages; identify degrees which offer insurance against sudden changes in earnings; and show how degrees affect the resilience of graduates' earnings to recover from earnings or unemployment shocks.We will exploit rich administrative data to develop flexible models of earnings dynamics and use these to simulate the lifetime earnings of recent cohorts of graduates. In addition to the LEO data, we have been granted new access to tax records from earlier cohorts that provides more than 10 years of earnings history for more than 12 million people up to their mid-forties. This large dataset with long panels of earnings enables us to estimate more flexible models of earnings dynamics than has been previously possible. We will investigate how earnings persistence and resilience to macro-economic shocks vary across different types of students, thus extending existing knowledge of earnings dynamics and improving the accuracy of lifetime earnings simulations.We will combine these simulated earnings profiles with the IFS's tax and benefit simulator and a model of student loan repayments to estimate the impact of degrees on lifetime tax and student loan payments and benefit receipts. This will significantly improve estimates of the wider social returns of different HE degrees, and allow us to estimate the impact the tax, benefit and student loan systems have on the private returns to different degrees.BenefitsBetter measures of the returns and public finance impacts of different HE degrees will benefit both students choosing education routes and governments deciding how to target funding within the sector. Our work will also contribute significantly to the academic literature on the returns to higher education, by highlighting variation in returns to different undergraduate and postgraduate courses and by advancing understanding of wider returns by looking at differences in earnings dynamics. The lifetime earnings methodology we develop will also benefit future academic and policy-focussed projects using LEO to investigate the long-run effects of policies.