The higher education premium as a measure of regional development

Abstract

Until the 1990s, studying the impacts of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) mostly focused on short-term impacts, i.e. the economic approach. In recent years, there has been a growing interest on the long-term impacts of higher education, especially concerning human capital. The human capital analysis (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1993) estimates the increase in productivity and incomes for individuals due to the knowledge and skills they acquired from attending a HEI. Following these authors, Bluestone (1993) suggested that the creation of human capital for higher education graduates can be estimated by assuming that wages are correlated only with the number of official school years.In this paper, the human capital of a higher education graduate, in a deprived region of Northeast Portugal has been determined considering that the education premium is due solely to the number of years in higher education. It was also possible to determine that the direct stakeholders, namely the government and the students, have different values and attitudes towards the higher education premium.