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Catching Up Is Hard to Do: Undergraduate Prestige, Elite Graduate Programs, and the Earnings Premium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2019

Joni Hersch Open the ORCID record for Joni Hersch [Opens in a new window]
Joni Hersch*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt Law School, 131 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN37203, USA
*
e-mail: joni.hersch@vanderbilt.edu
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Abstract

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can “scrub” a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 to 2017, this article examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and earnings among those with elite postbaccalaureate degrees. Few graduates of non-selective institutions earn postbaccalaureate degrees from elite institutions, and even when they do, undergraduate institutional prestige continues to be positively related to earnings overall as well as among those with specific postbaccalaureate degrees including business, law, medicine, and doctoral. Among those who earn a graduate degree from an elite institution, the present value of the earnings advantage to having both an undergraduate and a graduate degree from an elite institution generally greatly exceeds any likely cost advantage from attending a less prestigious undergraduate institution.

Keywords

benefit–cost analysisearnings benefiteducation and inequalitygraduate degreeshigher educationhuman capitalprofessional labor marketsreturns to educationwage differentials.D61I24I26J24J31J44
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 2019 , pp. 503 - 553
Copyright
© Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis, 2019

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to participants at the Vanderbilt Law School faculty workshop, Alison Del Rossi, and W. Kip Viscusi for valuable comments and to Sarah Dalton, Hannah Frank, and Colton Cronin for excellent research assistance.

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