OVEREDUCATION AND SKILL MISMATCH

Past research has operationalized the notions of overeducation, overtraining, occupational mismatch, and the like in terms of the deviation of a worker's attained schooling from the estimated mean or ''required'' schooling of the worker's occupation. The prevailing theoretical assumption has been that overeducation, so defined, is a valid indicator of whether a worker has acquired and is endowed with productive skills and abilities that his or her job fails to utilize. The theoretical and empirical analyses of this article suggest that this assumption is highly problematic.