Post-schooling outcomes of university graduates: a tax data linkage approach

This paper is rooted in the construction of a new and unique dataset which links administrative data on students who graduated from the University of Ottawa (a large Canadian urban university) from 1998 through 2010 with Canadian tax record data. [The authors] track students' post-schooling earnings on a year-by-year basis, and all graduates are followed through to 2011, which means [the authors] are able to track earnings over as much as 13 years for the earliest cohorts. [The authors] break earning profiles down by area of study and follow each graduating cohort separately, allowing [the authors] to compare patterns in starting earnings levels and earnings growth across graduating cohorts by area of study. This yields some interesting and important patterns. [The authors] also compare male-female earnings, and compare earnings quintiles across areas of study. This kind of analysis is not only useful for understanding higher education [HE] learnings premia and the returns to HE, but is also valuable for young people making schooling choices, for individual HE institutions and HE systems making program decisions, and for policy makers concerned with skills and skill shortages. The work is currently being extended to relate earnings outcomes to additional student characteristics and schooling experiences, and to include additional various additional sets of Canadian HE institutions in the analysis.

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