Der hohe Anteil an unterwertig Beschäftigten bei jüngeren Akademikern : Karrierezeitpunkt- oder Strukturwandel-Effekt? (The high proportion of younger graduates employed below their true worth : an effect of the stage in their career or of structural change?)

"In a study which recently appeared in the MittAB, Pflicht/Schober/Schreyer examined the degree to which western German graduates are employed in jobs matched to the level of their education. Clearly higher proportions of employment below the level of education was found for younger graduates than for older ones. The authors interpret this as a problem of people at the beginning of their careers. In this article the interpretation of these results is scrutinized critically. Despite a considerably deviating study design, the results from Pflicht/Schober/Schreyer can at first be repeated: women, graduates from polytechnics and younger graduates carry a higher risk of being employed below their true worth. With just a few steps in the study it can, however, be demonstrated that in the current labour market situation, the effect found for this particular age is not due to the stage in a career, but to the membership of certain risk groups. Besides women and polytechnic graduates, also university graduates with additional vocational qualifications, part-time workers and marginal part-time workers, as well as graduates who are not employed in the public sector have a higher risk of being employed below their true worth. The number of younger graduates to whom several of these risk features apply simultaneously has increased enormously over the last ten years. At the same time a large increase in the number of cases of young graduates being employed below their true worth can be observed. This contradicts the assumption that employment below true worth is a classical problem of those taking up employment for the first time, which lessens during the course of a person's career. If a risk analysis of employment below worth is made with multivariate controls of the named risk factors in addition to the age variables, the age effect which was still significant in the reduced model diminishes to an insignificant level in the 90's. The correlation between age andadequacy of employment, which is determined descriptively or only with a reduced model, proves to be a classical apparent correlation. The strong structural change observed on the graduate labour market, which is determined both by the supply side and the demand side (here especially by the recruitment behaviour of the public sector), leads to the expectation that the problem or graduates being employed below their true worth will gain significance considerably in Germany." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))