Escaping into a master's degree in times of crisis? Master's degree applications and enrolment over the business cycle

Marte E.S. Ulvestad and Siv-Elisabeth Skjelbred

Economics of Education Review, 2023, vol. 94, issue C

Abstract: The consequences of graduating in a recession could be severe and long-lasting. Bachelor's graduates can, however, avoid entering the labour market by continuing their education. Using a Norwegian dataset containing information on all graduates and their applications to and enrolment in master's degree programmes over a 15-year period, we find that a one percentage point increase in the field-specific unemployment rate results in a 6.5 percentage points increase in applications and a 3.9 percentage points increase in enrolment. Moreover, using a survey of the 2020 bachelor's graduates cohort, that is, the Covid-19 cohort, we find evidence indicating that those pushed into a master's degree by conditions in the labour market differ substantially from those whose decision to enrol in a master's degree is not driven by labour market conditions.

Keywords: Application; Enrolment; Business cycles; Bachelor's graduates; COVID-19 recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775723000511
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:94:y:2023:i:c:s0272775723000511

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102404

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().