Dr. Jan-Jan Soon is currently an Associate Professor at Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). She has been an academic with UUM for more than 2 decades, since 2001. She received a 3-year postgraduate scholarship from New Zealand’s University of Otago and earned her PhD in economics well within the 3-year duration. She then did her year-long postdoctoral studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and was also a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany. She is a UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab Expert, and a Global Labor Organization Fellow. She also sits in the 2024-2026 Exco Committee of the Malaysian Economic Association. Her research and publication work straddles the realms of higher education, labour and migration economics. Using micro-econometric estimation analyses, her empirical work mostly addresses issues of policy implications pertaining to migrants’ labour market outcomes, and employment issues of university graduates. She has successfully led 2 FRGS projects totaling to approximately RM150,000 @ USD32,000, produced 3 intellectual properties, published in 8 Q1 and 4 Q2 SSCI/Scopus journals of which she led 9 of the papers as first author. She sits in the editorial board of an international Scopus journal (South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases) and the Malaysian Management Journal. Due to her specific skill set in using a unique type of advanced econometric tool, she was invited to join a consultancy project commissioned by the Malaysian Ministry of Education to evaluate the impact of the Malaysian national early childhood education programme, i.e. the GENIUS programme. She is also a highly sought-after journal paper reviewer for top SSCI/Scopus journals in the field of economics published by reputable academic journal publishers. Her CV is available for download at https://janjansoon.blogspot.com/

The Catalyst for Higher Returns to Education:
Intervention Policies or Socioeconomic Background?

Does schooling pay off? - a seemingly straightforward question, but it is in fact a puzzle among economists. Answers would differ based on how the returns to schooling are estimated. Among the top concerns is whether such estimations have any causal connotation between the amount of schooling and its returns or earnings. The endogeneity issue arises due to ability bias, where ability is typically related with years of schooling. The impact of schooling would be confounded by ability, hence the difficulty in isolating schooling's causal impact on earnings. To address the concern, we conduct a meta-analysis of 74 empirical studies from which we retrieve returns to schooling coefficients estimated using both the causal instrumental variable and non-causal naïve estimation approaches. Key findings from our meta-analysis suggest an overall impact of 0.898, meaning an additional year of schooling is associated with a 8.98% increase in earnings, on average. We also find that over the years, returns to schooling exhibit an upward trend in general. Probing deeper, our analyses provide statistical evidence that education-related policy factors are driving the results more than family background factors.