Report: The College Payoff

From Inside Higher Ed: 

Reports of the demise of certain glass ceilings have been greatly exaggerated.

Women may dominate in higher education student bodies, and may soon dominate in the upper echelons of the U.S. workforce. But they need more degrees than men do in order to earn the same amount of money. “On average, to earn as much as men with a bachelor’s degree, women must obtain a doctoral degree,” says a new Georgetown University study.

The situation is similar for black and Latino students. White people with bachelor’s degrees typically will earn more over their lives than will blacks and Latinos who hold master’s degrees.

Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, describes these as “the most disappointing findings” of his new study, which was released today.

The study, entitled “The College Payoff,” is the latest of a string of studies Carnevale’s shop has released that generally tout the benefits of college attainment. (This study was trumpeted Thursday at a joint news conference with the Lumina Foundation for Education, whose college completion push resonates with the Georgetown study.) For this report, the Georgetown researchers estimated the lifetime money-making prospects of various types of degree holders. To reflect contemporary circumstances, they extrapolated a 40-year career based on 2009 earnings data. Unlike previous studies with similar methodologies, the study used median estimates rather than averages.

Carnevale and his co-authors describe gender and race/ethnicity as “wild cards that can trump everything else in determined earnings.”

A man who drops out of college will probably earn about as much as a woman who graduates with a bachelor’s degree, the study finds. Under current conditions, men are projected to out-earn women over their lives at every level of college attainment. The greatest gap occurs at the level of professional degrees. The Georgetown researchers projected that women who get a professional degree will earn $3 million over their lives. That is more than $1 million less than a man with the same type of degree.

Similar patterns hold within the ranks of professional academics. Among “postsecondary teachers,” women can expect to earn 18 percent less than their male colleagues, the study says.

...