Rapid increases in educational attainment and the massification of secondary education in
South Africa resulted in substantial differences in the supply and quality of educated
workers across generations. This paper describes changes in the distribution of education
across birth cohorts and how these relate to changes in the probability of employment, the
distribution of earnings and the earnings premiums to complete secondary and tertiary
education. Tracking cohorts over time allows us to disentangle generational and life‐cycle
components of these changes. Younger cohorts are shown to have increasingly faced worse
labour market conditions than their predecessors, although this may be changing for
cohorts born after 1980. Furthermore, the relative reward to complete secondary and
tertiary education has remained positive, and increased for tertiary educated cohorts born
since the 1960s. Increases in earnings inequality among those with complete secondary
education suggests increased variance in education quality during the period when
completed secondary education expanded rapidly.