Trends in Educational and Skill Mismatch in the United States

Dong-Hoon Shin,David Bills

doi:10.3390/socsci10100395

Abstract

We examined trends in the incidence and correlates of educational and skill mismatch in the United States. We focused on trends over time in the associations between various types of mismatch and a range of factors including contextual conditions. We explored whether contextual conditions at the transitional period from school to jobs increase or decrease the probability of mismatch and whether such relationships persist throughout the working career. Our central questions were how the incidence of and relationship between educational and skill mismatch in the U.S. changed between 1994, 2003, and 2012 and how this differed by age, gender, immigration status, educational attainment, and occupation. We used three cross-sectional surveys that had not previously been implemented for such an effort. These were the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in 1994, the Adult Literacy and Life-skills (ALL) survey in 2003, and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in 2012. Repeated cross-sectional data provided us with substantial analytic leverage. Our findings point toward the key role of occupational or positional factors rather than individual worker characteristics as being most implicated in trends in mismatch. We describe the importance of our results for labor market theories.

Highlights

We examined whether contextual conditions at the transitional period from school to jobs increase or decrease the probability of mismatch and whether such relationships persist during the career
The growing number of overutilization substantially contributed to the trends
A paucity of studies have examined the trends in skill mismatch; the findings of this study are difficult to compare with those of prior studies

Summary

Introduction

The transition from school to work is an inflection point that sets the career into motion. Higher levels of education is expected to have a direct or indirect impact on rewards for having good jobs. There are various views on how education is linked to jobs. Some scholars pay attention to the impact of education on people’s cognitive and affective growth that subsequently helps them to find higher paying jobs (i.e., human capital theory), while other scholars argue that the symbolic aspect of education has an important impact on the acquisition of jobs (e.g., signaling theory, screening theory, and credentialism). In an ideal labor market, regardless of the underlying theories, jobs acquired during the transitional period would be tightly connected to previous schooling. A career may not begin with a job that matches a person’s interests, capabilities, or academic backgrounds

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion