Date Published:

2018

Abstract:

Much research and policy attention has been on socio economic gaps in participation at university, but little attention has been paid to gaps in earnings. This paper addresses this shortfall using tax and student loan administrative data to investigate the earnings of English graduates up to their mid thirties by socio economic background. We find that  graduates from higher income families (from the top fth of the income distribution of those enrolled in university) have average earnings which are 20% higher than those from lower income families. Once we condition on institution and subject choices, this premium roughly halves, to around 10%. The premium grows with age and is larger for men, in particular for men at the most selective universities. We follow Chetty et al. (2017) and estimate English mobility scorecards by university and subject, highlighting the good performance of medicine, economics, law, business, engineering, technology, math, computer science and architecture courses as well as the prominent London-based universities.