Arnaud Chevalier and Joanne Lindley (2009) Over-Education and the Skills of UK Graduates. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 172 (2). pp. 307-337. ISSN 0964-1998
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During the early Nineties the proportion of a cohort entering higher education in the UK doubled over a short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on graduates’ early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated. This measure is well correlated with alternative definitions of over-education. Comparing pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates, we find with this measure, that the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. We do not find that institution type affects the probability of genuine over-education. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills and suffer a large wage penalty. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it does not alter these conclusions.
This is a Draft version This version's date is: 04/2009 This item is peer reviewed
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(C) 2009 Wiley-Blackwell, whose permission to mount this version for private study and research is acknowledged. The repository version is the author's final draft.
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