Early career trajectories of first- and second-generation migrant graduates of professional university

ABSTRACT

This study explores how the careers of professional university graduates with a first- or second-generation non-Western migrant background evolve within the first four to eight years after graduation, as compared to their Dutch native peers. We find that in the first year after graduation, while holding constant background characteristics, both first- and second-generation migrants experienced lower employment chances, more skill mismatches and lower job satisfaction than natives. No wage differences could be observed between migrants and natives. Although the differences between first- and second-generation migrants appeared to be small in the short term, a follow-up survey four to eight years after graduation revealed evidence that second-generation – but not first-generation – migrants improved their situation overall. They maintained earnings parity with natives, and narrowed the gap in terms of job satisfaction, skill match, and to a somewhat lesser extent employment chances. Although the first generation eliminated the gap with respect to natives in terms of employment chances, they continued to show lower job satisfaction and opened up a wage gap as compared to their native Dutch peers. This suggests that early-career gaps for first-generation migrants are enduring and cannot easily be resolved.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• Professional university graduates
• early career trajectories
• first- and second-generation migrants
• longitudinal analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although many immigrants experience relative downward social mobility: they end up in lower socioeconomic positions in their destination countries than they would have in their origin countries.

2 Agriculture, engineering, economics, health care, arts & humanities, social studies, education, law and science. The latter two fields are mainly restricted to academic universities, while the majority of teacher training takes place in HBO institutions.

3 For a more detailed account of the representativeness of the data used, see Appendix I.

4 We have estimated all models with robust and clustered standard errors within cohorts to account for the dependency in observations of respondents from a same cohort. In all models, the proportion of variance on the cohort level was very low and did not significantly differ from zero according to a likelihood ratio test. Therefore, we did not account for this clustering in our final models.

5 As a robustness check, all analyses presented in this paper were repeated with Japan and Indonesia included as non-Western countries. These models yielded similar effects as the final models in which these countries were included as Western countries.

6 As a robustness check, the analyses were also carried out using a stricter criterion for unemployment, namely a minimum of 20 h of work per week. This yielded highly similar results, as can be seen in Appendix II.

7 To eliminate possible differences in grading norms, GPA was operationalized as the deviation from the average grade of graduates who followed the same study programme at the institution.

8 To show how much difference the Heckman correction makes, Online Appendix III shows the results of all multivariate analyses without inclusion of the inverse Mills ratio as control variable.

9 Due to the relatively small number of cases it was necessary to restrict the number of control variables, to avoid instability in the estimates. We only omitted those control variables that had little or no relation to outcomes and/or migration background.