Who Benefits Most from a University Degree?: A Cross-National Comparison of Selection and Wage Returns in the US, UK, and Germany

Recent research on economic returns to higher education in the United States suggests that those with the highest wage returns to a college degree are least likely to obtain one. We extend the study of heterogeneous returns to tertiary education across multiple institutional contexts, investigating how the relationship between wage returns and the propensity to complete a degree varies by the level of expansion, differentiation, and cost of higher education. Drawing on panel data and matching techniques, we compare findings from the US with selection into degree completion in Germany and the UK. Contrary to previous studies, we find little evidence for population level heterogeneity in economic returns to higher education

From higher education to work patterns of labor market entry in Germany and the US

"Previous comparative studies describing the transition from school to work and national patterns of labor market entry have often had to simplify the complex transition processes involved. For example, the first job after education is not easy to define if a person returns to education. In addition, most of this research has concentrated on national patterns shaped by the experiences of the majority of young people. In this paper we concentrate on a particular group of school-leavers, viz. those entitled to enroll in higher education. We describe their transition patterns from school to work, including recurrent education leading to more than one instance of labor market entry after leaving education. A comparison between Germany and the United States enables us to answer the question of how various features of the tertiary education systems influence these patterns, i.e. the number of people actually returning to education and the time it takes to finally enter the labor market. The systems of higher education in Germany and the US differ in several ways that we assume to be important for the transition patterns from school to work: (a) the mode of stratification (parallel tracks in Germany vs. consecutive tracks in the US) provides different labor-market prospects and incentives for returning to education; (b) the coordination mechanism (state-controlled vs. market-based) is decisive for the diversity of institutions and their orientation to particular target groups; (c) the degree of standardization in educational programs is important for more or less smooth transitions to the labor market. Taking into account that labor-market flexibility also differs in the two countries, we derive our main hypothesis: transition patterns from higher education to the labor market in the US are less standardized and regulated than in Germany. We expect that students attending the lower-tier institutions in the US (community colleges) will display significant differences in this respect over and against their German counterparts attending a Fachhochschule (university of applied sciences). In our empirical analyses we actually find overall differences with regard to variance in the ages at which young people leave education and enter the labor market. US students gain much more labor-market experience in the period between their initial and ultimate exit from education. Differences between lower- and higher-tier institutions are less marked than expected, both within and between the two countries." (author's abstract

Differentiation and social selectivity in German higher education

In this paper we investigate social selectivity in access to higher education in Germany and, unlike most previous studies, explicitly devote attention to semi-tertiary institutions such as the so-called universities of cooperative education. Drawing on rational choice models of educational decisions we seek to understand which factors influence upper secondary graduates from different social backgrounds in their choices of diverse tertiary institutions in Germany. We find that scholastic performance, expected job security, study duration, monetary costs and preferences for study content considerably contribute to the creation of socially selective choice patterns of post-secondary careers. The characteristics of semi-tertiary institutions—such as universities of cooperative education that combine firm-based training with tertiary education—constitute a potential alternative that could reduce inequities in access to higher learning