Les diplômes français se sont-ils dévalorisés ?. Les rendements de l’éducation et de l’expérience en France, 1992-2017

We study the evolution of wages and employment rates of a large sample of young French workers between 1992 and 2017, exploiting the CEREQ ?Generation surveys?. The devaluation of a degree is simply defined as a decrease in the average real wage of the holders of a particular category of degree. Such a devaluation occurred for university Master?s degrees and the degrees of Engineering schools, between 1997 and 2015, with approximately a 10% drop in real wages. In contrast, there is no devaluation of certificates with levels less than or equal to that of the baccalauréat (i.e., the French terminal high-school degree), this result being mainly caused by increases in the minimum-wage rate. Structuring the survey data as an unbalanced panel, we estimate log wage equations, controlling for potential or effective experience and degree indicators. Estimation results show that a substantial part of the devaluation is due to a decrease (or ?flattening?) of returns to experience. We do not know if degree devaluation is due to a change in the unobserved selection of graduates. It seems however likely that the observed decrease in real wages is mainly due to the rapid growth of the number of university graduates, and not to the business cycle or adverse selection.