The labor market returns to “first-in-family” university graduates

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The labor market returns to “first-in-family” university graduates

Shure, Nikki; Henderson, Morag; Adamecz-Volgyi, Anna; (2022) The labor market returns to “first-in-family” university graduates. Journal of Population Economics 10.1007/s00148-022-00908-y. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

We examine how first-in-family (FiF) graduates — those whose parents do not have university degrees — fare in the labor market in England. We find that among women, FiF graduates earn 7.4% less on average than graduates whose parents have a university degree. For men, we do not find a FiF wage penalty. A decomposition of the wage difference between FiF and non-FiF graduates reveals two interesting findings. First, two-thirds of the female FiF penalty is explained by certain characteristics, including having lower educational attainment, not attending an elite university, selecting particular degree courses, working in smaller firms, working in jobs that do not require their degree, and motherhood. Second, FiF graduate men also differ in their endowments from non-FiF graduate men; however, FiF men earn higher returns on their endowments than non-FiF men and thus compensate for their relative social disadvantage, while FiF women do not. We also estimate the returns to graduation for potential FiF and non-FiF young people. We find that the wage returns to graduation are not lower among FiF graduates compared to those who match their parents with a degree.

Type:	Article
Title:	The labor market returns to “first-in-family” university graduates
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1007/s00148-022-00908-y
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-022-00908-y
Language:	English
Additional information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Socioeconomic gaps · Intergenerational educational mobility · Higher education · Labor market returns · Gender economics · First-generation · First in family
UCL classification:	UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149368