This paper provides evidence of heterogeneity in the returns to higher education in the UK.
Attending the most prestigious universities leads to a wage premium of up to 6% for males.
The rise in participation in higher education also led to a greater sorting of students and an
increase in the returns to quality. These results somehow justify the recent introduction of
top-up fees. Additionally, identification strategy matters and OLS estimates may be severely
biased. However, our estimates, based on propensity score matching, are imprecise due to
the thinness of the common support.
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