Population size and the job matching of college graduates

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between a region’s population size and the match of college-educated workers to jobs that require a degree. Results show a positive relationship between degree match and county population size in the United States, with a 100,000-person increase in population associated with a 1.3-percentage point increase in the likelihood of a match. The analysis uses a person’s grade point average in college to account for the potential sorting of higher-skilled workers into larger urban areas and the dataset has individuals across a wide range of regions from small rural areas to big cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Urbanization
• matching externalities
• degree match
• U.S. regions

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R10
• R12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Using information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the National Center for Education Statistics, we compared UMaine to all U.S. Land Grant Universities by calculating – for a variety of indicators – standardized values (i.e. z-scores) that measure the number of standard deviations above or below the mean across all institutions. UMaine has a higher student admission rate (z = 1.11) and percentage of undergraduate students receiving financial aid (z = 1.02), and a slightly higher full-time student retention rate (z = 0.16). UMaine has a lower percentage of students who are female (z = −1.07), percentage of students who are African American (z = −0.49) and percentage of students who are Hispanic (z = −0.34), and a slightly lower total enrolment (z = −0.24) and SAT math 75^th-percentile score (z = −0.19).

² Although Hartog (2000) suggests that people may overstate the education required for their jobs, Berlingieri (2019, 1,264) notes that this tendency “would be an issue only if workers in small and large labour markets systematically differ in the way they answer such a question”..

³ Berlingieri's (2019) result of 19% of the sample being “overqualified” is similar to our match rate of 84% (i.e. equivalent to 16% overqualified).

⁴ Other approaches could have been a logit estimator or linear probability model.

⁵ The variables measuring an advanced degree and college of major also capture an individual’s level of skill.

⁶ To find this result, we reoriented our analysis from degree match (i.e. 84% of the respondents are in jobs that require a degree) to job overqualification (i.e. 16% of the respondents are overqualified for their jobs).

Additional information

Funding

The University of Maine Alumni Association paid for the costs of conducting the alumni surveys. Gabe’s research program is funded, in part, by Hatch Multistate Grant # ME 031808 (NE 1749) from the USDA National Institute of Food & Agriculture.