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The Economists’ Voice
Volume ,Issue Article
Does College Still Pay?
Lisa Barrow∗Cecilia Elena Rouse†
Summary
Since the mid-1990s college tuition costs have risen quickly while the rate of increase
in the value of education has slowed considerably. Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow explore
the reasons and ask if college remains a good investment.
KEYWORDS: Returns to education, College education
∗Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
†Princeton University
Copyright c
2005 by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher, bepress, which has been given certain exclusive rights by the
author. The Economists’ Voice is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress).
http://www.bepress.com/ev
Inthe 1980s the value of a college education grew significantly.
According to Census data, in 1979 those with a bachelor’s degree or higher
earned roughly 45 percent more per hour than workers with only a high school
diploma. By 1989 wages for college graduates were more than 70 percent higher
than those of high school graduates.1This dramatic change revived arguments
over the cause and effect relationship between education and higher income. In
other words, was education driving income levels or was the education trend a
byproduct of rising income levels? This debate spawned a very large literature
tying increasing income inequality to a decrease in demand for workers without
marketable skills. A key reason for the increasing value of a college education
was the increasing cost of not having one: Real earnings of workers without some
college education fell during the 1980s, as earnings of the more highly educated
increased. Politicians and policymakers tried to enact policies to improve
educational attainment, for as President Clinton stated: “Today, more than ever
before in our history, education is the fault line between those who will prosper in
the new economy and those who will not.”2
But the labor market changed in the mid-1990s. The hourly wage gap
between those with college education and those without, which had grown by 25
percentage points in the 1980s, grew by only 10 percentage points in the 1990s.
At the same time, college tuition rates increased extremely rapidly. The wage-gap
slowdown has led some to wonder: Has college ceased being the better deal over
the past few years? Do rising tuition levels mean that the value of a college
education has peaked? And even, is attending college still worth the costs?
Our answer to the final question is yes. College is definitely still worth the
investment. In fact, there are no signs that the value of a college education has
peaked or is on a downward trend. Also, the rapid annual percentage rise in the
cost of tuition has had little effect on the value of a college education, largely
because tuition is a relatively small part of the true total economic cost of
attending college. Most of the true economic cost of college is the wages students
forego while they attend—and those have not risen by very much at all.
1All levels of education have become more valuable since the late 1970s. The return on each year
of schooling was 6.6 percent (in terms of hourly wages) in 1979, compared with 9.8 percent in
1989 and 10.9 percent in 2000. We focus on college education here due to space limitations.
2“President Clinton’s Call to Action for American Education in the 21st Century” (February
1997) available at www.ed.gov/updates/PresEDPlan/part9.html, accessed on April 4, 2005.
1Barrow and Rouse: Does College Still Pay?
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The Changing Value of Education
To make sense of trends in the economic value of education, one must first
understand what economists see as the “return to education.” The return to
education is the capitalized present value of the extra income an individual would
earn with additional schooling, after taking into account all of the costs of
obtaining the additional schooling.3This return to education may change because
of a shift in the income for individuals who obtain more schooling or a shift in the
income of those who do not. Also, a change in the economic costs of education
can affect the return to education.
Figure 1 shows the average hourly real wages (relative to hourly wages in
1980) for four sets of workers between 1980 and 2004. The four categories
include: those who did not complete high school; those who only earned a high
school diploma; those who have some college education but did not earn a
bachelor’s degree; and those who earned at least a bachelor’s degree. Through the
mid-1990s average hourly wages increase fairly steadily among those with at least
abachelor’s degree, while the real wages of high school dropouts and of those
with only a high school diploma decline. These trends account for the large
increases in the return to schooling through the mid-1990s.
Since the mid-1990s the average wages of college graduates have
skyrocketed, increasing by 18 percent by 2004. However, the wages of high
school dropouts have also risen, climbing by 10 percent in the second half of the
1990s from their lowest levels in 1994. Because of this turnaround in the wages
of high school dropouts, the college wage premium has risen at a much slower
rate of increase than before. And rapidly rising tuition costs must be set against
this slower rate of increase.
3Ideally, one would observe a worker’s income were she to obtain the additional schooling, and
then compare this to her income were she to obtain no further schooling. Because an individual
either obtains more schooling or does not, this ideal is impossible to measure. Therefore,
economists typically compute the return to schooling by comparing the average income of workers
who have obtained the additional schooling to those who did not. The main conceptual issue with
this observed return to schooling is a concern that workers who obtained the additional schooling
may also differ from those that did not along unobserved dimensions (such as they were more
motivated or hard working). Further discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper;
however, we refer the interested reader to Card (1999).
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Figure 1
Hourly Wages by Education Group
Relative to 1980 Hourly Wages
Source: Authors’ calculations from the 1980–2004 (even years only) Current Population Survey
Outgoing Rotation Group files available from Unicon. We limit the sample to individuals
between ages of 25 and 65 years, and drop observations with wages < 1/2 of the minimum wage or
above the 99th percentile of the distribution.
Why Is the Premium No Longer Rising as Rapidly?
Many economists in the 1990s thought the major source of increasing
wage inequality was “skill-biased technological change” (see Bound and Johnson
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[1992] and Katz and Murphy [1992]). Changes in technology increased the
productivity of high-skilled workers relative to low-skilled workers, raising the
relative demand for the former. Therefore, relative wages for high-skilled workers
rose, while those for the less-skilled declined. An end to this skill bias in
technological change could account for the leveling off of the return to education.
While possible, we do not believe this is a likely explanation. The relative
wages of college graduates have risen at the same time as the supply of high-
skilled workers has increased, due to higher enrollment at colleges and greater
immigration of high-skilled workers. Between 1996 and 2000 college enrollment
rose by nearly 7 percent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Since
1999, 36 percent of immigrants entering the U.S. had at least a bachelor’s degree
compared with 24 percent of immigrants arriving in the 1980s (Current
Population Survey, 2003). The share of the population aged 25 to 65 years old
with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 26 percent in 1996 to 30 percent in
2004.4.Despite the growth in the relative supply of college graduates, the wages
of college graduates have continued to rise dramatically, which indicates an
increasing—not a decreasing—demand for their skills. Moreover, average wages
of workers with lower levels of education have also increased since 1995; it is this
turnaround in the trend which accounts for the slowing growth in the return to
schooling.
Thus the relevant question is: Why have the wages of these lower-skilled
workers increased in the past decade?
Minimum wage increases in the late 1990s helped increase the wages of
the lowest-skilled workers, but it is unlikely to account fully for the turnaround.
First, the last increase in the federal minimum wage came in late 1997, two years
after average wages of the lowest-skilled workers began to increase. It cannot
account for subsequent increases in the wages of low-skilled workers. The states
that have raised their minimum wages since 1997 make up only about one-third of
U.S. payroll employment: It is unlikely that state minimum wages can fully
account for changes in average wages across the entire country.5Moreover, there
is an anomaly in the time-series relationship between minimum wages and
inequality: In the data, the level of the minimum wage is correlated with
4Authors’ calculations based on March CPS data. Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2004) also find that
the relative supply of college-equivalent labor continued to increase throughout the late 1990s and
early 2000s.
5States that raised their minimum wages include Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware,
Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and
Washington. The District of Columbia also raised its minimum wage.
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inequality at both the bottom (where it should be) and the top (where it shouldn’t
be, if a low minimum wage is a cause and not a consequence of high inequality)
of the wage distribution.6The booming economy of the late 1990s is the most
likely explanation for the turnaround, as it raised the average wages of all
workers, including those with the lowest skills.7
Why College Education Is Still Worth It
How good an investment finishing college is depends on both earnings
and costs—the earnings of college graduates relative to high school graduates and
the costs of attending college (both tuition and foregone earnings). Tuition and
fees for a four-year college for the 2003–2004 academic year averaged $7,091;
the average net price—tuition and fees net of grants—was $5,558 (both amounts
in 2003 dollars).8If we assume that tuition and fees continue to rise as they did
between the 1999–2000 and 2003–2004 school years, and conservatively look at
sticker rather than net prices, the average full-time student entering a program in
the fall of 2003 who completes a bachelor’s degree in four years will pay $30,325
in tuition and fees. If we assume an opportunity cost equal to the average annual
earnings of a high school graduate (from the March 2004 Current Population
Survey) and a 5 percent discount rate for time preference, the total cost of
attending college rises to $107,277. In other words, college is worthwhile for an
average student if getting a bachelor’s degree boosts the present value of her
lifetime earnings by at least $107,277.
What is the boost to the present value of wages? At a 5 percent annual
discount rate, it is $402,959. The net present value of a four-year degree to an
average student entering college in the fall of 2003 is roughly $295,682—the
6Lee (1999) finds that in the 1980s the fall in the real value of the minimum wage can account for
increasing inequality at the bottom of the wage distribution, suggesting that minimum wage
increases of the mid-1990s also propped up wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, although
Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2004) raise some caution about this interpretation. Namely, they
highlight that much of the decline in the real value of the minimum wage during the 1980s
occurred during an economic downturn, whereas the minimum wage increases in the 1990s were
legislated during economic expansions.
7Studies of labor market cyclicality, e.g., Hoynes (2000) and Hines, Hoynes, and Krueger (2001),
show that earnings and (especially) employment are procyclical and that less educated individuals
experience greater cyclical variation than more educated individuals.
8U.S. Department of Education, 2005, based on data from the National Postsecondary Student
Aid Study.
5Barrow and Rouse: Does College Still Pay?
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difference between $402,959 in earnings and $107,277 in total costs.9A student
entering college today can expect to recoup her investment within 10 years of
graduation.
It still pays to go to college—very much so, at least as much as ever
before.10
Lisa Barrow is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Cecilia
Rouse is a professor at Princeton.
Letters commenting on this piece or others may be submitted at
http://www.bepress.com/cgi/submit.cgi?context=ev
References and Further Reading
Autor, David H., Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney. 2004. “Trends in
U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists,” Unpublished manuscript.
Bound, John and George Johnson. 1992. “Changes in the Structure of Wages in
the 1980’s: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations,” The American Economic
Review, 82(3), pp. 371-392.
Card, David. 1999. “The Causal Effect of Education on Earnings” in Handbook
of Labor Economics, Vol. 3A (Orley C. Ashenfelter and David Card, editors).
(Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 1801-1863.
9Assuming that the college graduate–high school graduate earnings gap is constant over the
lifecycle and equals the difference in average annual earnings for these two education groups as
measured in the 2004 March Current Population Survey, a college graduate earns $27,800 more in
inflation adjusted dollars per year. Alternatively, if we assume annual earnings will follow average
earnings by age, the net present value to a first year student in the fall of 2003 is roughly $246,923
($354,200 in earnings minus $107,277 in tuition, fees, and lost wages). Note that by using annual
earnings we take into account the higher rates of unemployment among high school graduates.
This may not be correct, to the extent that lower unemployment is not the result of completing the
bachelor’s degree; rather, it may be result of having the personal factors that made it likely that an
individual would complete the degree in the first place.
10 Note, however, that future changes in the U.S. labor market might affect relative compensation.
If many more people who otherwise would not have attended college decide to do so, a
dramatically increased supply of college graduates would compete in the labor market, and hence,
the net benefits of college might be significantly smaller than we calculate.
6The Economists' Voice Vol. 2 [2005], No. 4, Article 3
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Current Population Survey. 2003. “Table 2.5: Educational Attainment of the
Foreign-Born Population 25 Years and Over by Sex and Year of Entry: 2003,”
The Foreign-Born Population in the United States: March 2003. (P20-539).
Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/foreign/ppl-
174/tab02-05.xls on April 1, 2005.
Hines Jr., James R., Hilary W. Hoynes, and Alan B. Krueger. 2001. “Another
Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats,” in The Roaring Nineties: Can
Full Employment Be Sustained? (Alan B. Krueger and Robert M. Solow, editors)
(New York: The Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 493-537.
Hoynes, Hilary W. 2000. “The Employment and Earnings of Less Skilled
Workers Over the Business Cycle,” in Finding Jobs: Work and Welfare Reform.
(Rebecca Blank and David Card, editors) (New York: The Russell Sage
Foundation), pp. 23-71.
Katz, Lawrence F. and Kevin M. Murphy. 1992. “Changes in Relative Wages,
1963-1987: Supply and Demand Factors,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
107(1) (February), pp. 35-78.
Lee, David S. 1999. “Wage Inequality in the United States During the 1980s:
Rising Dispersion or Falling Minimum Wage?” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 114(3) (August), pp. 977-1023.
Pierce, Brooks. 2001. “Compensation Inequality,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 116(4) (November), pp. 1493-1525.
Snyder, T. D., A.G. Tan, and C. M. Hoffman. 2004. “Table 174. Total fall
enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by attendance status, sex of student,
and control of institution: 1947 to 2001,” Digest of Education Statistics, 2003.
(NCES-2005-025). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education
Statistics. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from
http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/tables/xls/tab174.xls on April 1,
2005.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2005.
National Postsecondary Student Aid Study: Undergraduate Online Data Analysis
System.
7Barrow and Rouse: Does College Still Pay?
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Acknowledgements:
We thank Gadi Barlevy, Jonas Fisher, and Alan Krueger for useful
conversations, and Kyung-Hong Park for expert research assistance. All errors in
fact or interpretation are ours. The opinions in this paper do not reflect those of
the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System.
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