Taking loans to finance private education may not be a big thing in the country right now, but given the way salaries rise in response to higher education, it may not take too long for things to change. The latest OECD Economic Survey of India uses NSS and other data to examine what happens to wages at various levels of education and finds that, for college education, salaries tend to offer a return of over 15 per cent a year "" well above the typical OECD return of around 10 per cent. There is a catch though. All of this depends upon the kind of jobs that the educated get after they finish college/school. If they're lucky enough to get employed as full-time workers, the returns to a college graduate can be over 15 per cent, but if the same person gets a contract job, the returns can be a much lower 3.6 per cent. When you consider that just 15 per cent of those employed have regular full-time jobs, and that this is down from around 16 per cent in 1990, that's a big caveat.
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