Degrees of Devaluation: College Expansion and the Credential Trap in India

Abstract

India's post-liberalisation higher education expansion was premised on widening credential access for historically excluded groups. We show that the groups most expected to benefit - Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) workers - instead bore a disproportionate share of the resulting wage cost, a pattern we term the double whammy. We merge eight rounds of the NSS Employment-Unemployment Survey (1987-2011) with a district-level measure of college-expansion intensity built from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) and estimate reduced-form triple- and quadruple-difference wage specifications across 91 districts in six states (N = 79,904), interacting graduate status, expansion intensity, and post-expansion cohort. The human capital return to a degree remains large and positive throughout (about 1.08 log points), yet the graduate wage premium erodes for post-2004 cohorts in high-expansion districts: non-SC/ST graduates earn roughly 9 per cent less than comparable graduates in low-expansion districts at mean intensity, and SC/ST graduates face an additional penalty of about 34 per cent (a combined shortfall near 43 per cent). The SC/ST differential is statistically indistinguishable from zero before the expansion and emerges only afterwards. Non-graduate placebo and pre-trend tests are broadly consistent with a credential-signalling channel, though we flag the limits of the design rather than claim clean identification. The results suggest that expanding access without commensurate investment in institutional quality can deepen, rather than narrow, labour-market inequality for disadvantaged groups.