Is It worth Being ‘Traditional’ in An Era of Mass Individualization?

Abstract

This article deals with the question of how the segmentation of higher education participation connects with the segmentation of the graduate labour market into jobs with different levels of quality. With data comprising educational and labour market histories of graduates with Master's degree from nine European countries, the author analyses how graduates with traditional higher education careers come off on the European labour market compared to those with non‐traditional educational careers. When examining the quality of the employment that graduates obtain early on in their career, three criteria are applicable: the job stability and the quality of the education‐job match to both the level of their studies and skills. The method used in the analysis is logistic regression. Results indicate that being a traditional/non‐traditional graduate does affect the odds of finding proper employment; however, whether the influence is positive or negative greatly varies with respect to gender; the number of graduates with the same type of educational career on the local market and the criteria used to evaluate the adequacy of the employment.

Notes

1. Available at <http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/mtrow/>.

2. The stipulated duration of completing Master's degrees is typically four years in Italy and the Netherlands and five years in the other countries. The degrees granted from the non‐university sector, such as the German Fachhochschule and the Dutch HBO degrees, have not been included in the study. Of the countries compared, the UK is the only one that had a degree system with two stages during the 1994/1995 academic year, in which completing a Bachelor's degree was the prerequisite for advancing to the Master's level. The French degree system is much more complicated in comparison with the other countries included in this study. It includes the continuum of four university degrees: deug (2 years) – licence (+1 year) – maîtrice (+1 year) – DEA/DESS/maîtrice ingenieur (+1 year), as well as several degrees from other institutes of higher education. As far as France is concerned, the analysis applies to graduates with four‐year maîtrice degrees and five‐year DEA/DESS degrees, as well as graduates with Engineering or Business School diplomas. The typical age for being eligible for higher education is 19 in Italy, Finland, and Norway; in France, Austria, the Netherlands, and the UK, it is 18 or 19; in Spain, the age is 18, and in Germany, 19 or 20.

3. Details available at <http://www.uni‐kassel.de/wz1/TSEREGS/publi_e.htm>.

4. For details of the optimal‐matching algorithm, see Abbot and Hrycak (1990) and Halpin and Chan (1998).