Overeducation among European University Graduates: a Comparative Analysis of its Incidence and the Importance of Higher Education Differentiation

The incidence of over-education is here assessed by applying a set of standard subjective and objective indicators and a new skill-based indicator of over-education to the national samples of eight European countries in the REFLEX survey. With the exception of Spain, the results reveal that over-education is not very widespread amongst European tertiary graduates. Yet, the contrast between the standard indicators and the skill-based indicator reveals the existence of an over-education of a moderate kind in countries with high tertiary attainment rates, such as Norway, Finland and Netherlands. Interestingly, such a type of over-education does not come to the surface when applying the standard indicators. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate analyses also reveal the importance of higher education differentiation. In particular, our results indicate that the tertiary field of study and the branch of Higher Education (bachelor vs. master, university vs. vocational college courses) are of critical importance for understanding the risk of over-education. Graduates from humanistic fields, bachelor courses and vocational colleges are more exposed to over-education. This result is systematic across the set of countries under examination, although the size of these effects varies cross-nationally to a significant extent. Our results point to the importance of contextualizing over-education with regard to the interdependence between structural dynamics and institutional factors.