Abstract
This paper analyses the labour market entry of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life, using a specific data set drawn from the Spanish Module Education to Labour Market Transitions (2000). Special attention is paid to university graduates, because Spain experienced a strong growth in the demand for higher education during the last decades of the 20th century. The empirical evidence shows that although over-education is a common phenomenon in the Spanish youth labour market, being a graduate seems to be associated with a lower likelihood of over-education in the first job. Our results indicate that over-education affects more women than men and foreigners than Spaniards.
Highlights
The seminal empirical works focusing on the study of educational mismatch date back to the early 1970s, when this problem and its consequences were detected for the first time in Canada [1] and in the United States [2]
These results confirm the existence of an important educational mismatch in the first significant employment, because only 48.8% of young people find a first employment in accordance with their educational level
In that sense, focusing on the results of the Spanish case, we can conclude that overeducation is an extensive phenomenon during the first stages of careers for young people in Spain, and undoubtedly, young graduates are suffering from this problem from many years ago
Summary
The seminal empirical works focusing on the study of educational mismatch date back to the early 1970s, when this problem and its consequences were detected for the first time in Canada [1] and in the United States [2]. Several researchers have analysed the scale and the impact of educational mismatch in different developed countries. The results of these studies show that a percentage of the employed population presents a mismatch between their educational attainment and the level of studies required in their job [3,4,5]). The literature on mismatch in the labour market is quite extensive, studies focusing only on young people and devoted to analysing the influence of socioeconomic variables on overeducation in the first job are not very abundant. Allen and van der Velden [6] examine the labour situation of Dutch youngsters, and they find that more than 40% of young white men are overeducated at the beginning of their working life, whereas only 13.6% of them present undereducation in their first employments
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