The purpose of this research is to examine whether, for those who have left full-time education, a low-skill job provides them with a good start to their working lives. It was found that starting out in a low-skill job gives lower payoffs than starting out in a high-skill job. Five years after leaving full-time education, the wage penalty (after conditioning on education and other characteristics) still exists but this scarring effect diminishes over time. However, any job is better than having no job.
The authors of this paper explore whether low socioeconomic status (SES) students benefit to a greater or lesser extent from attending high-quality schools when compared with their more advantaged peers.
This paper was written to encourage policy-makers to think about how to measure socioeconomic status (SES). It also provides some data on socioeconomic status and tertiary education participation and speculates about the likely impact of an expansion in higher education on those from a low socioeconomic background.
This report uses Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data to look at the impact of schools on a student’s tertiary entrance rank (TER) and the probability of them going to university (controlling for TER).