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ABSTRACT
This study uses quarterly EU Labour Force Survey data for 30 countries over the period 2000 to 2016 to examine the relationship between changes in the composition of educational attainment and overeducation rates among new labour market entrants holding post-secondary and tertiary qualifications. We find that tertiary education expanded rapidly across our sample, while the proportion of young people with lower levels of education fell gradually throughout the period. Despite the significant increases in the percentage of young people educated to tertiary level, overeducation among new tertiary graduates fell. The descriptive evidence also suggests that some of the greatest declines in overeducation of young tertiary graduates occurred in the countries experiencing the most significant expansion in tertiary education. Overeducation rates among young graduates with upper-secondary and post-secondary (non-tertiary) education were lower in magnitude than overeducation of tertiary graduates and declined slightly over the period. Our GMM results confirm the negative relationship between educational expansion and overeducation for both tertiary and post-secondary graduates, and reveal a number of other factors potentially explaining cross-country variation in youth overeducation rates.
KEYWORDS:
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes
1. We have all EU member states apart from Malta due to data limitations.
2. These reviews also discuss the various measurement approaches to overeducation as well as the role of unobserved heterogeneity, which may potentially bias some estimates of overeducation.
3. A detailed discussion on the different measurement approaches can be found in McGuinness et al. (2018b), including a discussion of their relative advantages and disadvantages.
4. The 2016 survey is the latest dataset available to us.
5. This is defined as the share of workers in SOC 2 and 3 to the share of workers in SOC 7, 8 and 9.
6. Overeducation can only occur for this group in the case of individuals educated to ISCED level 2 who are employed in occupations with a modal education level of ISCED 1.
7. The p-value is 0.12.
8. This has certainly been the case in Ireland. For Instance, Barrett, McGuinness, and O’Brien (Citation2012) report that 54 per cent of migrants from EU accession states in Ireland held a third level qualification compared to 45 per cent of Irish nationals.
9. Specifically, the vocational education variable relates only to those who answered that they were a student or an apprentice in regular education during the last four weeks and they answered that this level of education or training was ISCED 3 or ISCED 4.
10. It is unclear why zero rates have been reported here, however, this is most likely to reflect peculiarities of accreditation systems in these countries.
11. As opposed to the share of full-time employees aged 15 to 29 in receipt of vocational education.
12. For instance many vocational programmes will be sponsored by employers, thus countries with more employment in sectors such as construction and manufacturing are, almost by definition, likely to have more developed educational pathways.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Judith Delaney
Dr Judith Delaney is a post-doctoral researcher at the Economic and Social Research Institute. Judith completed her PhD at University College London in 2017. She is interested in labour economics and the economics of education. She has published in notable journals such as Journal of Labor Economics, Economics of Education Review and Education Economics.
Seamus McGuinness
Dr Seamus McGuinness is a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Economics at Trinity College Dublin and an IZA Research Fellow.
Konstantinos Pouliakas
Dr Konstantinos Pouliakas is an expert on skills and labour markets at the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop). He leads Cedefop’s projects on Digitalisation, AI and the Future of Work and Skill Mismatch. His milestones include the development of two waves of the European Skills and Jobs Survey. He has been contributor to the World Economic Forum and author of influential policy contributions on skills anticipation and mismatch (Skills Agenda for Europe). He has represented Cedefop at high-level international conferences in Europe, USA, Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Before joining Cedefop he held posts at the University of Aberdeen and University of Cyprus and briefly worked for the Bank of Greece and HM Treasury. He is Honorary Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen Business School, IZA Research Fellow and has been Invited Professor at Universita Degli Studi Roma TRE and Visiting Research Scholar at the IMF. He holds an M.Phil from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College) and a D.Phil from the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals of education and economics (e.g. Economica, Journal of Economic Surveys, Research in Labour Economics, Education Economics, International Labour Review etc.).
Paul Redmond
Dr Paul Redmond is a research officer at the Economic and Social Research Institute and an adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include labour economics, the economics of education, applied econometrics and political economy. He has published in journals such as the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Surveys, Public Choice, Fiscal Studies and the European Journal of Political Economy.