What is an ATAR and what does this have to do with income?
Look I’m from New Zealand – so when everyone around me started talking about ATARs I just smiled and nodded.
In fact I probably couldn’t talk to most people in New Zealand about education. I’m from the “pre-NCEA” era – where a single end of year exam for five courses, scaled to fit a within-course normal distribution, determined most of anything. As a result, these more complex design criteria are well outside of my lived experience.
But it turns out ATARs are a very important part of an individuals assessment in Australia – providing a measure of how well a student performed relative to their peers, and determining their university admission.
This raises a question – how is a good performance on your ATARs associated with future earnings? Luckily for us Elyse Dwyer and Silvia Griselda at e61 decided to find out.
![](https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc10daff2-55ea-4f06-a8a7-d6d102543122_1024x1024.png?w=1500&ssl=1)
tl;dr a higher ATAR is associated with higher average earnings – but there is significant variability in income by ATAR. As a result, even though we’d expect the type of person who receives a higher ATAR to end up with higher earnings at 30, there is a lot more going on under the hood.
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