What's in an ATAR? How University Admission Scores Predict Future Incomes

We compare the earnings of people with different ATARs (who enrolled in university) with: • people who never enrolled in university over this time period (’No Uni’) • people who enrolled in university using an alternate pathway (’No ATAR’).1 After the age of 25, median incomes vary between people who received different ATARs (Figure 1). [...] At age 30, we find that the median salary for people with an ATAR over 98 is $33,000 higher than the median salary for people with ATARs below 70.2 Figure 1: Median Annual Earnings by ATAR Figure 2: Distribution of Annual Earnings by ATAR In 2022 dollars, workers born in Australia Workers born in Australia between 1988 and between 1988-1997 1991 at age 30*, in 2022 Dollars 000s 000s 000s 000s (98,. [...] However, after age 25, the earnings of people without a university degree remain well below those of people with a university degree. [...] Because we only see ATARs for people who enrol in university, we cannot compare the incomes of people with different ATARs regardless of whether or not they went to university. [...] The variation in earnings is even bigger for 30-year-old workers who are university graduates, and have an ATAR above 95: • one in ten earns less than $30,000 per year • one in ten earns more than $156,000 per year.4 Overall, there is a large variation in incomes between groups of people with different ATARs, just as there is a large variation in incomes within groups of people with similar ATARs.