The College Wage Premium and the Expansion of Higher Education in the UK*

Abstract This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross‐section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006—a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand suggests that graduate supply considerably outstripped demand which ought to imply a fall in the premium. We find no significant fall for men and even a large, but insignificant, rise for women. Quantile regression results reveal a fall in the premium only for men in the bottom quartile of the distribution of unobserved skills.