Of all the criticisms hurled from time to time at higher education, the one I simply don’t get is the one about “churning out overqualified graduates.” Anyone who says this simply has no idea what universities are for or how human capital works.
First of all, “overqualification” is endemic within higher education itself, so it’s unlikely to be seen as a bad thing by the people at whom the accusation is hurled. People who acquire Ph.D.s and spend years in advanced research are vastly overqualified to teach undergraduates – a fact universities recognize every time they allow a teacher to buy out a class and be replaced by a grad student or post-doc (that is to say, several hundred times a year). It’s a bigger deal in some fields than others: graduate theses on Goethe are manifestly unnecessary to teach Intro German, and sending your Bates Clark medal candidate to teach Econ 100 probably isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time. In many fields, the nostrum about research improving one’s teaching ability frankly only works if the research isn’t particularly cutting edge.
This is not a flaw in higher education; it’s most definitely a feature. The whole reason you don’t leave the whole thing to the private sector so that your wages can be competed away is precisely so that you can have overqualified profs hanging around, adding to the sum of knowledge and apprenticing the next generation of scholars.
Second, how is it that people think that expanding access to higher education is meant to improve overall economic productivity if not precisely by making at least some people overqualified? Human capital helps speed innovation through the economy by bringing progressively higher skill levels into more and more economic sectors which previously did not “need” it. At the outset, whenever university graduates invade a particular sector, they always seem overqualified; over time it seems completely natural and appropriate that people in these fields have those higher skill levels because it makes the level of service in that profession that much higher (think nurses and journalists in the ’70s, for instance).
If you limit the creep of “overqualified” graduates, the only other way in which education can contribute to the economy via human capital is to deliberately overproduce graduates in particular fields so that wages will fall (which is what the IT and construction industries are always advocating). That can work – Germany’s dominance of the chemical industry is due to this, for instance, but it doesn’t make it popular.
In short, beware the arguments about overqualification. It’s actually good for us – in moderation, at least.
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Interesting argument and the first time I’ve actually seen overqualification positioned as a good thing. I would agree that over-qualification isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It’s pretty much impossible to be precisely qualified for the job. And under-qualified isn’t an option. So, first, by necessity and generally, the work force will be over-qualified. Additionally, I agree that being ahead of the minimal skill/knowledge level to do a job has the potential to lead to innovation.
But two caveats should be added.
First, “qualification” does not equal skill/knowledge level. I refer here to a variety of things, not the least of which is credentialism. Have certain letters after the name does not mean higher skills/knowledge. I would be more comfortable with your thesis if you said that having higher skills/knowledge than the minimum necessary is not necessarily a bad thing.
Secondly, but relatedly, you seem to assume that the over-qualification is in the field in which the individual is working. We see an increasing number of university graduates of all levels (BA –> PhD) who are unable to find work in their fields. These people are not over qualified in the construction, Barista, restaurant, reception jobs they have if their degree is in History. Their superflous (for the industry) skills/knowledge in History are not likley to lead to industry innovation. It appears as though we have more graduates in a great many fields that available positions for which their degrees are meaningful.
We toss around the concept “the knowledge based economy” and tell youngsters that they won’t have a chance at a good future without a degree. But the reality is that although having more highly qualified engineers engineering, and more highly qualified teachers teaching, and more highly qualified nurses nursing etc…can lead to advances in these fields, we also have an increasingly low-skilled job market and an increasingly high-skilled labour market. As computers assume routinizable cognitive tasks that skilled workers used to do, and machinery/robots assume routinizable physical tasks that skilled workers used to do, we are creating a bifurcated skills economy. Creating more graduates does not create more jobs in the fields in which those graduates have studied.
I would indeed love to live in a society where everyone has a post-secondary education for a variety of reasons. But it does not follow that simply increasing the graduate pool will have a net positive effect on employment.