I have no empirical evidence for this. It is just a feeling that I have. However, there are probably some exceptions.

In terms of the human capital versus job-market signalling debate, I suspect that higher ed plays both roles. However, I think that for most degrees (especially the traditional ones), the human capital effect dominates. I have no empirical evidence for this. However, there are probably some exceptions.

John Quiggin wrote a journal article some time back suggesting that he thought the human capital story was more relevant thatn the signalling story. I think it was published in the Australian Economic Review, although I’m not sure about that.

I don’t see why this should happen in the private sector. Employers are generally looking for the least expensive persons that can do the job. In my field companies are now often happy to hire our BSc graduates even though I don’t think they are qualified until they do honours.

I think it is more likely part of a more compex phenomenon of devaluation of degrees where people doing the same degrees are progressively less and less qualified. It all starts from school.

Creeping credentialism seems quite a negative thing, leading people to obtain unnecessary credentials if only to compete with others.

It could be, but it could also be (as someone pointed out in the comments to a previous post on returns to higher education), that graduates are on average more intelligent than say the average non-graduate clerical worker (for example) and employers are rewarding this rather than specific skills acquired through education.

Some people also argue that graduates in jobs that don’t need degrees encourages credentialism among employers, in that they artificially raise the job requirements. This is generally thought bad for society, because it makes it harder for people who do not have strong educational qualifications, often because of social disadvantage, to progress through the workforce.

As I have conceded (several times) I am not saying that over-education is always bad, or that even if it is bad we can easily identify those individuals who will end up over-educated. In my paper I am making a narrower point: that if we have more than half a million graduates not using their educational qualifications it casts doubt on the labour market argument, made by Bob Birrell and Craig Emerson, that we need more graduates. On the available evidence, we need more graduates in a number of fields, but not overall.

In terms of the apparent mismatch between education and the requirements of positions, I can see how one might think that there’s a misallocation of resources (in that people are being over-educated for particular positions). It could also well be true that people who are in positions for which they are over-educated may be unhappy - but they can, of course, find new positions in which they will hopefully be happier.

While there *may* be a misallocation of educational resources in terms of there being many people over-educated for their positions, I’d like to raise the possibility that a person’s overall “contribution” to society (in terms of their unpaid and paid work and other activities) may be increased through more education. This is just an idea, I have no figures about this - but perhaps what this isn’t completely nebulous - maybe it could be measured in some way. For example, from the end of the post:

“From my reading of the over-education literature, over-qualified people in the same job categories tend to earn slightly more than the average appropriately-qualified person in the same job category,”

Eg, perhaps a person who is “over-educated” for their position will, on average, be more efficient/productive.