Are Over-educated People Insiders or Outsiders? A Case of Job Search Methods and Over-education in UK. ESRI WP258, September 2008

Kucel, Aleksander and Byrne, Delma (2008) Are Over-educated People Insiders or Outsiders? A Case of Job Search Methods and Over-education in UK. ESRI WP258, September 2008. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

There is substantial empirical evidence that over-education seems to be a persistent rather than transient phenomenon (Dolton and Vignoles, 2000: 179, Frenette, 2004: 29, McGuinness and Wooden, 2007: 1, Sloane et al., 1999: 1437, Smoorenburg and Velden, 2000: 207). Furthermore, it has been established that some fields of study lead significantly more often than others to over-educated jobs (Frenette, 2004: 29, McGuinness, 2003: 1943, Ortiz and Kucel, 2008). That is, pursuing some fields of study lead to a higher probability of obtaining a job which requires a lower educational qualification than the one actually possessed. The relationship between over-education and field of study has attracted much attention, with studies indicating that over-education is less frequently observed in fields of study that provide access to narrowly defined labour markets, which are in turn determined by a country’s general labor market structure as well as its educational system. As a consequence, we expect that the pursuit of employment upon completion of different fields of study will result in differences in the ease/difficulty of finding an appropriate job.

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