Various Approaches to Measuring Effectiveness of Tertiary Education

This paper aims at assessing selected approaches to measuring the effectiveness of investment in tertiary education and their applicability. It summarizes various results obtained in the research project Methods of Measuring the Return on Investment in Higher Education. The applied methods, include classical methods (ANOVA, Mincerian earnings function, correspondence analysis, hierarchical agglomerative clustering) as well as new ideas (application of the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Rank Test to determine the significance of differences in incomes before and after reaching the tertiary education). The research is based on data coming both from Polish (Social Diagnosis, Study of Human Capital) as well as German databases (Social Economic Panel, SOEP). The obtained results support the hypothesis that tertiary education influences the level of incomes. Moreover, the estimated pseudo rates of return to education provide the basis for the evaluation of the effectiveness of private investment in education.