ABSTRACT

The paper compares the worth of public and private university education. We develop a Public–Private University Worth parity index and provide empirical estimations to lend rigour in testing our main hypothesis that the type of university education does not matter in determining salaries and skills’ value-added. Using data from a recent questionnaire survey, our proposed parity index suggests that private university graduates have higher salaries, while public university graduates have better skill gains. Nevertheless, after controlling for variables not captured in the index calculations, our empirical estimations show no strong evidence that type of university education drives salaries and gains in skills’ value-added. Our paper fills the gap of empirical works that compare public-private university worth, particularly in the context of Malaysia and countries with a similar public-private university education system. Our findings behove policy-makers to de-emphasise the public-private university divide.

摘要

本文比较了公立和私立大学教育的价值。我们开发了公立-私立大学价值平价指数，并提供了经验估计，以检验我们的主要假设（大学教育的类型对确定薪资和技能的增值无关紧要）的严格性。利用最近一次问卷调查中的数据，我们建议的均等指数表明私立大学毕业生的薪水较高，而公立大学毕业生的技能收益较高。但是，在控制了指标计算中未捕获的变量之后，我们的经验估计没有强有力的证据表明大学教育类型会推动薪资和技能附加值的增长。我们的论文填补了比较公立和私立大学价值的实证研究的空白，尤其是在马来西亚和拥有类似公立-私立大学教育系统的国家/地区的背景下。我们的发现使决策者不再强调公私大学之间的鸿沟。