Do higher CGPAs translate into higher salaries? Recent findings from two Malaysian universities

This paper explores a key issue, i.e. whether academic high-achieving graduates really do earn higher salaries compared to their less academically inclined counterparts. There are two recent developments that motivate this paper – university students‟ laments on getting paid mere pittances on their first jobs upon graduating and the impending introduction of a new computation of academic performance scores (the iCGPA) by the Ministry of Higher Education.These two developments point to the important relationship between university academic performance (proxied by CGPA scores) and the salaries of the new graduates‟ first proper job.Using a recent unique dataset collected from the 2016 and 2017 graduating batch of university students, this paper looks specifically at this relationship.The main objective of this paper is to determine if better academic performances in university (i.e. higher CGPA scores) really do translate into higher salaries of the graduates‟ first job