Colombia: a young university graduate earns twice as much as a high-school peer, yet both have the same unemployment, about 10%
In Norway the pay premium is only 5%, and graduates' unemployment is no lower either (3.2% against 2.7%). Across 42 OECD countries the pay premium of a degree and the unemployment gap are almost unrelated.
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Money and work are different gains of a degree. Where it brings a large pay premium it does not necessarily protect against unemployment, and the other way round. So a single «does university pay off» number misleads: pay and the chance of being out of work need to be looked at separately.
Bars: how many percent the earnings of a full-time, full-year worker aged 25–34 with tertiary education exceed those of a peer with upper secondary (the latest year the OECD publishes).
- Colombia: earnings aged 25–34 with tertiary, upper secondary = 100 (2023) index
205
- Colombia: unemployment aged 25–34, tertiary / upper secondary (2025) % of labour force
10.3 / 10.2
- Norway: earnings aged 25–34 with tertiary (2024); unemployment, tertiary / upper secondary (2025) index; % of labour force
105; 3.2 / 2.7
OECD, Education at a Glance: relative earnings (upper secondary = 100) and unemployment aged 25–34 by ISCED 2011 with survey errors. Colombia: earnings of 2023, unemployment of 2025, gap 0.0 pp with a standard error of 0.21, below 1.96 errors. The association is Spearman's rank correlation across 42 countries: earnings aged 25–64 and the 25–34 unemployment gap, ρ = 0.18.
Data years differ between countries. Earnings are for full-time, full-year workers only. Tertiary (ISCED 5–8) includes short-cycle programmes. The data do not explain why: countries differ in graduate shares, industries and informal work.
A question for this picture
Where has the unemployment gap between graduates and high-school peers vanished?