By 1975, the effect of a year's primary schooling upon the wages of Africans in South Africa had fallen to about 2.5 percent--one of the lowest primary schooling returns in the world. Secondary schooling returns were high throughout the period 1960-90. The collapse of primary schooling returns...

Using a fairly rich data set from South Africa, the paper finds that, despite the sobriquet 'gutter education,' the African schooling systems help to create cognitive skills, and these skills are a determinant of wage levels. Various robust estimators are used but the influential outlier problem...