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Title: Overeducation in the United States: An Evaluation of Its Economic Impact and Its Relationship to College Quality, Individual Ability, and Job Duration
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Robst, John Michael |
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Overeducation in the United States: An Evaluation of Its Economic Impact and Its Relationship to College Quality, Individual Ability, and Job Duration Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1994 Cohort(s): Young Men Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Career Patterns; Colleges; Job Requirements; Job Tenure; Labor Economics; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Overeducation; Training; Wage Effects; Work Experience Studies have found that overeducated workers--those who have more education than their jobs require--earn less than comparably educated workers just meeting their job requirements. Sicherman (1991) proposed several reasons for the existence of overeducation. First, overeducated workers have less experience, tenure, and training than adequately educated workers. Second, overeducation may be part of the career mobility process, where workers temporarily accept jobs for which they are overeducated to receive additional training. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men and find: (1) significant biases in previous studies of the wage effects of overeducation due to unobserved heterogeneity; (2) significant ability and quality of schooling differences for overeducated workers; (3) overeducated workers may have greater mobility than adequately educated workers in similar jobs. The first issue addressed is the impact of potential heterogeneity biases on the wage effects of overeducation. If workers with low ability or quality of education are overeducated and receive lower wages, estimates of the wage effects may capture the earnings loss due to ability. Fixed effects models indicate no significant wage differential for overeducated workers. Thus, differences in typically unobserved characteristics may be responsible for the observed wage gap. The next chapter uses proxies for ability and college quality to examine the potential trade-off between the quantity and quality of schooling. Overeducated workers who attended lower quality schools or have less ability may need more schooling to be qualified for a job than the typical worker. Results indicate workers who attended lower quality colleges or have lower ability are more likely to be overeducated. The last chapter tests the mobility hypothesis described above. Sicherman found the average overeducated worker was more likely to change jobs than the average adequately educated worker. This could indicate they are more often employed in occupations which have shorter job durations. Thus I analyze the relationship between overeducation and job duration within occupations. I found overeducated workers may have shorter job durations even when in the same occupation. |
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Bibliography Citation
Robst, John Michael. Overeducation in the United States: An Evaluation of Its Economic Impact and Its Relationship to College Quality, Individual Ability, and Job Duration. Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1994. |