Do secondary education systems influence the overeducation risk of university graduates? A cross-national analysis by field of study and social background
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To what extent do features of education systems in the secondary school influence university graduates being overeducated? Previous research shows that the social origin and the field of study of university graduates are relevant predictors of overeducation. However, the strength of the influence of their social origin varies across fields of study. Having a privileged social origin prevents university graduates from being overeducated in fields of study that are not occupationally focused (e.g. humanities), while it is less relevant in other fields (e.g. engineering). The unevenly distributed effect of social origin in relation to the field of study may also vary across countries, depending on the influence of the secondary education system on social selection. Social origin may provide a filter earlier in vocationally oriented educational systems, whereas in comprehensive systems the social filter occurs at the graduate’s entry into the labor market. This would make university graduates from nonoccupationally focused fields of study and with a disadvantaged social origin more vulnerable to being overeducated in countries with comprehensive secondary school systems, while in vocationally oriented systems social origin may be less influential at that later stage. Using Research into Employment and professional FLEXibility/Higher Education as a Generator of Strategic Competences (REFLEX/HEGESCO) data in combination with macro-level indicators, I assess how secondary education systems mediate the influence of social origin in terms of the university graduate’s risk of overeducation by field of study. When using a subjective measure of overeducation results suggest that social origin is less important in predicting the overeducation of university graduates in countries with greater vocational orientation at the secondary level, while in comprehensive systems social origin regains its influence as a filter when graduates in nonoccupationally oriented fields join the labor market. Yet, results do not hold when using an objective measure of overeducation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".