"Higher Education Peers and Labour Market Outcomes" by Joseph Richardson

Topic

We investigate to what extent differences in graduate outcomes between degree programs reflect the quality and identity of one’s peers. By exploiting year-to-year idiosyncratic variation in peer composition within university courses using administrative education data covering all of England, we find that having more academically able coursemates increases earnings. This effect is sufficient for the difference in peer ability between the 10th and the 90th percentile most selective courses to increase earnings by 5%. One potential mediator for this effect is improved graduation rates. However, we cannot detect any effects for peer socioeconomic status or gender and do not find any meaningful treatment effect heterogeneity.