The purpose of this article is to discuss how policies can affect investment in tertiary education in ways that would eliminate some of the perceived shortcomings of existing systems, while preserving or (preferably) enhancing equality of access to higher education. To this end, the analysis...

This article provides estimates of the private Internal Rates of Return to tertiary education for women and men in 21 OECD countries, for the years between 1991 and 2005. IRR are computed by estimating labour market premia on cross-country comparable individual-level data. Labour market premia...

Educational outcomes are shaped by a wide range of factors, including innate students’ characteristics, family and school background and other environmental factors. But a key-question for policy-makers is what schools and school policies can do to raise overall student performance. Several...

This study focuses on the single most important component of the private return on tertiary education, the gross wage premium. There are at least two additional reasons for paying particular attention to wage premia. First, the wage premium earned by existing graduates is easy to observe, so...