Education as investment, consumption or adapting to social norm: implications for educational mismatch among graduates

ABSTRACT

Relying on data for Belgian graduates, we investigate the relationship between motives to participate in higher education (investment, educational consumption, student life consumption and social norms) and overeducation after graduation. We also examine whether these motives affect the relationship between overeducation and other outcomes like wages and job satisfaction. Key findings are that individuals motivated by educational consumption are less likely to be overeducated but face a stronger job satisfaction penalty to overeducation. Moreover, those motivated by student life consumption have a higher likelihood of overeducation.

KEYWORDS:

• educational motives
• educational choices
• job satisfaction
• wages
• underemployment
• overqualification

Acknowledgement

We thank Piet Coppieters, Karel Neels, Seamus McGuinness, Rolf van der Velden, the participants of the workshop of the European Network on Transitions in Youth (Barcelona, 2014) and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This work was supported by the Flemish Government in the framework of the SONAR research program and the Policy Research Centre for Study and School Careers (SSL).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dieter Verhaest http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4787-6427

Notes

1 Also psychologists have extensively focused on the associations between motivations and behaviors or other outcomes. Central within this literature is the distinction between controlled and autonomous motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000; Vansteenkiste and Lens 2006). Controlled motivation refers to doing something because of pressure by external or internal forces. Autonomous motivation refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or because it is personally important (Vansteenkiste and Lens 2006). Within this categorization, investment motives and social norms are thus conceived as controlled motivation, while consumption motives are rather conceived as autonomous motivation.

2 In line with this, psychological studies find that autonomous motivation is associated with better academic performance (Soenens and Vansteenkiste 2005).

3 One may argue that overeducation may be a source of satisfaction for those being motivated by investment if it allows them to avoid unemployment. However, we compare the job satisfaction of overeducated workers with their satisfaction in case of adequately employment only and not with their satisfaction in the case of unemployment.

4 For individuals without jobs at the time of the interview (at age 23, 26 or 29), information refers to the end of their last job.

5 A tenth item, not listed in the table, was ‘to practice the occupation of my own choice’. In a first factor analysis, this item had more than one factor loading. Since the item both refers to future labor market perspectives and to the individuals’ specific interests, it seems to be related to both investment and consumption motives. Therefore, the item was excluded from the analysis.

6 Multinomial logit model estimates may be biased in case of violation of the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption. To assess whether this is an issue, we ran a series of supplementary multinomial logit models in which, each time, the individuals who chose for a particular alternative were deleted. The conclusions based on each these supplementary estimations were largely similar to those based on the model that includes all alternatives.

7 Extreme values (two standard deviations above or below the average log) were excluded.

8 For a detailed discussion on this approach to tackle random measurement error in overeducation, see Robst (1994), Dolton and Silles (2008) and Sellami et al. (2017).

9 While the coefficient of social norms on the difference in likelihood between ‘Arts’ and the reference category is statistically insignificant in Table 4, additional estimates reveal those motivated by social norms to be significantly more likely to choose for ‘Arts’ than for other fields in general (p < 0.10) and for the fields of ‘Education’ (p < 0.01) and ‘Natural sciences & engineering’ (p < 0.10) in particular.

10 These estimates are available upon request.

11 Estimation results for these robustness checks are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flemish Government [Vlaamse Overheid] in the framework of the SONAR research program and the Policy Research Centre for Study and School Careers (SSL).