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Tag: Overqualified

Overqualification

Sorry for the late blog appearance: I’ve been bouncing around Alberta and British Columbia for work and play this week (#ICETECA, baby) and it’s tough to write on these terrible little short-haul flights.  Anyways, today I want to talk about a paper which came out a few weeks ago called Overqualification among 2012 and 2013 bachelor’s graduates, by Statistics Canada’s Diane Galarneau.  “Overqualification” is a fraught topic to define and measure.  This study uses a snapshot of bachelor’s graduates a couple

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November 18, 2021 2 Comments

An Interesting but Irritating Report on Graduate Overqualification

On Thursday, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a report on the state of the Canadian labour market.  It’s one of those things the PBO does because the state of the labour market drives the federal budget, to some extent.  But in this report, the PBO decided to do something different: it decided to look at the state of the labour market from the point of view of recent graduates, and specifically whether graduates are “overqualified” for their

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November 16, 2015 2 Comments

That Overqualification Study

A couple of weeks ago, Statistics Canada published a study that looked at overqualification among university graduates (available here).  It’s a good-news story that deserves a bit more attention than it’s received. The study uses data from the 1991 and 2006 censuses, as well as the 2011 National Household Survey, to look at the changing occupational profile of Canadians aged 25-34.  To digress briefly into the world of occupation statistics: every occupation in North America is given what’s called a

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April 29, 2014 No Comments

Some Insights Into Medium-term Education Outcomes

As I noted yesterday, Canada is unnecessarily bad at looking at medium-term outcomes of education. The only place where we have data on university graduates even five years out is in BC, and they publish the data in such a weird format (seriously: check it out) that no one really explores them. It could be worse. In 2005, Statscan, did a 5-year follow-up of the class of 2000 and elected not to publish any results relating to employment or income.

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June 4, 2013 No Comments

Overqualified? Good.

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

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March 7, 2012 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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