The study shows that a worker with a master's degree earns around 80% more than someone with only the 12th grade, and, in the case of graduates, the salary difference is 45%. However, researchers warn of the low number of children from disadvantaged families in master's degrees.

In recent years, the number of young graduates and those with master's degrees has increased, but the transition to a master's degree still "constitutes a crucial axis of inequality among higher education graduates", points out the study released that analysed the evolution between 2018 and 2023.

Around 40% of graduates immediately move on to a master's degree (five percentage points more than in 2018), but this transition "depends greatly on the context of the graduates, with important consequences in terms of equity", emphasise the researchers, pointing out that there are more men continuing their studies.

It is also more common to see students from universities than from polytechnic institutes enrolling in master's degrees: 58% of students from public universities compared to only about a quarter from the public polytechnic system.

"Inequality is also visible in the different transition rates between graduates with at least one parent with higher education and other graduates. This difference (from 48% to 37%) has increased in the last five years," say the researchers.

In the same sense, early dropout is more visible among young people who are the first in their family to attend higher education, a phenomenon visible in undergraduate, master's and higher technical and professional courses (CTeSP).

Students "from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and from less educated families face additional challenges, such as less family support, fewer cultural resources and greater economic difficulties," warn the researchers, who add that "the dispersion of rates between the two cycles will also not be unrelated to these transition differences."

Finding work

In addition to the more qualified young people earning better salaries, there are also fewer and fewer of those who face difficulties in finding work.

"While the unemployment rates of high school graduates, bachelor's degrees and master's degrees were relatively similar before the pandemic, in recent years, master's degree holders have had unemployment rates around 40% lower than those of high school graduates," the researchers say.

Unemployment rates among higher education graduates were below 6% and professionals with master's degrees fell to values ​​close to 4.7%, while the working population with a 3rd cycle of basic education continued to have higher unemployment than before the COVID-19 pandemic and CTeSP holders had rates above 10%.

These figures hide the areas where graduates continue to have more difficulty finding work - social services, information and journalism areas and architecture and construction - as opposed to graduates in the health area, who have unemployment rates of only 1.2%.

The study also shows that graduates in the areas of mathematics and statistics, engineering, computer science, science and education tend to be below or close to the 2% unemployment rate threshold.

However, researchers emphasise the impact of education from an early age on future job market value. The future begins to take shape as soon as children are able to attend daycare and preschool, then move on to choosing between a scientific-humanistic or professional education in secondary school and, finally, access to bachelor's and master's degrees.