Earnings of university bachelor’s degree graduates in information and communication technology programs: A tax data analysis

This article presents an analysis of the labour market earnings of university graduates with bachelor’s degrees in information and communication technology (ICT) programs using a dataset that links information on students from the University of Ottawa to tax records held at Statistics Canada. We track each cohort of graduates from 1998 through 2010, thus covering the dot-com boom and subsequent bust in 2001. We compare ICT graduates with engineers from non-ICT fields as well as with all other graduates. ICT graduates and non-ICT engineers generally earned a premium over graduates from all other disciplines taken together. However, ICT graduates’ earnings fell sharply after the dot-com bust, after which they partially recovered and then remained relatively stable. The number of graduates continued to rise through 2005, reflecting the lag between entering and graduating from an ICT program, and then continued to fall through 2010.