The recent debate about Higher Education (HE) funding in the UK has lead to renewed discussion about the value of a university degree. In particular, funding arrangements that require students to pay for the cost of their education and/or maintenance over the course of their lifetimes, as well as the continued interest in the entry decision faced by students and the effects of funding changes on access to HE, have led to a need to evaluate the benefits of higher education over the course of a working lifetime. A variety of numbers have appeared in the popular press, with perhaps the most widely cited being that 'graduates earn an average of 35 per cent more than the average wage' ,or '£400,000 more over a lifetime than somebody on average earnings'.

Evaluating these benefits over the course of a working lifetime is not straight forward, since the lifetime earnings and employment profiles of past, let alone, future graduates cannot generally be observed in most existing UK data sets. The most widely used data source that is used to look at this issue, the Labour Force Survey, only interviews the same individuals for 5 consecutive quarters, and only contains data on wages in two of those 5 quarters. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) follows the same individuals annually, but has only been running for 10 years. Other panel data surveys such as the NCDS and BCS70 follow individuals throughout their life, but only for individuals born in 1958 (NCDS) and 1970 (BCS) and therefore are not informative as to the earnings and employment profiles of recent graduates. In this project, we propose to use a new methodological approach, making extensive use of copula functions, that will allow us to use information from both cross-sectional data AND panel data to obtain the best and most up-to-date estimates of lifetime earnings and employment profiles for HE graduates and non-graduates. Most importantly, this approach allows us to look at the entire distribution of outcomes - not just those of the 'average' HE graduate or 'average' non-graduate.