The private rate of return to a university degree in Australia

Abstract

This article presents estimates of the private monetary benefits in Australia associated with the completion of Bachelor degrees for a range of fields of study under a range of different assumptions. For the average person, results show strong monetary incentives to complete these degrees and the private rate of return compares favourably with the real long-term bond rate. However, differences can be observed in rates of return according to gender and discipline of study with, generally, lower returns for women and for those holding degrees in the humanities. The results are calculated on varying assumptions which provide evidence of the robustness of the conclusions. Finally, implications for policy, such as university financing and increases in university places, are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.