Written by: Preston Cooper
Published by: Forbes
MBA News Digest Comment: None.
Extracted Content: In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Joseph Altonji and Ling Zhong investigate this question. Altonji and Zhong examine individuals’ earnings before and after attending graduate school, then extrapolate their pre-graduate school earnings to estimate what those workers would have earned had they not gone for an advanced degree. After that, they account for the cost of tuition at a typical public university, and the opportunity cost of shunning full-time work for a few years while going back to school. This allows the authors to estimate the net lifetime earnings gains for several different graduate degrees.