Using CASMIN: the effect of education on wages in Britain and Germany

Measures of educational achievement in surveys are not difficult to interpret. Qualifications need to be transparent because they are common currency in the labour market, sometimes also in the marriage market, and are widely accepted as indicators of social status. Although there are problems of transparency in some highly credentialist systems, for instance in Great Britain with its complex array of vocational qualifications and poorly defined vocational system (Mason, Prais, and van Ark 1990; Department for Education and Employment 2000), in general this is not the case: someone with a specific certificate is in principle expected to have a capability at a level that can be clearly understood. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that survey data which report qualifications can be analysed unambiguously. However, the analytical relationship between different levels of qualification is far from transparent. There is no means of knowing a priori how much a degree is ?worth? relative to a school-leaving certificate, and this value will itself vary across domains: for instance, in wage equations, mobility studies, analyses of children?s educational performance, voting studies, and so on. Moreover, there is no external source which can unequivocally validate the meaning of credentials.