Skills-Matching, Young People and Emigration

A recent edition of RTE's Frontline programme featured a contribution on skills-matching from audience member and fine art graduate Seanan Kerr. I may never talk about skills-matching as passionately as this man.

EUA launches new study on Tracking Students' and Graduates' Progression Paths (TRACKIT!)

The European University Association (EUA) has announced the launch of TRACKIT!: a two-year project which will undertake a comparative study that focuses on tracking procedures applied by institutions, national agencies and researchers regarding students’ and graduates’ progression paths during studies and in transition into the labour market. In particular, it will consider the impact and relevance of tracking on institutional strategic aims.

The study ultimately aims to:
• enhance institutional reflection on how to ensure high quality student-centred learning and training
• improve the understanding of the articulation between degrees and employability
• underpin ongoing educational reforms and deliver an important contribution to the realisation of a Europe of knowledge.

It will consist of background data and literature collection, qualitative research based on site visits to institutions and a final report containing a provisional impact assessment of tracking measures for institutional enhancement.

TRACKIT! is being implemented by EUA, in a consortium with the Hochschul-Informations-System GmbH (HIS), Hanne Smidt Consulting, the University of the Peloponnese, the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University and the Irish Universities Association. It is supported by the Lifelong Learning Programme and will be completed in September 2012.

Assorted Links

1. Last week Obama unveiled a $14 billion plan to help troubled homeowners

2. Need cash in a hurry. Don't worry; you can get it here, within 15 minutes. Only in the UK.

3. Leisure College, USA

4. Human Behavior and Economics: A Survey of Recent Literature, 1914

5. An analysis of the Graduate Labour Market in Finland: the impact of Spatial Agglomeration and Skill-Job Mismatches

6. Linguistic Elitism and Gender in the Irish Labour Market: How much Advantage is there to Workers in Ireland Speaking Irish and being Male? Evidence from the 2006 Census

7. College fee regime to change in US

8. Identity Economics and Life Reconstruction

Some Blog Links

1. A new report from the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training: "The skill matching challenge: Analysing skill mismatch and policy implications". HT: Michael Egan. [The report is largely based on the contributions of Nigel O’Leary and Peter Sloane (Welmerc, School of Business and Economics, Swansea University), Seamus McGuinness and Philip O’Connell (ESRI – Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin) and Kostas Mavromaras (NILS – National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia).]

"With global competition increasing, demographic change unfolding and rapid technological change intensifying, skill mismatch has come to the forefront of Europe’s policy debate (European Commission, 2008). Skill mismatch refers not only to skill shortages or gaps, but also to qualifications, knowledge and skills exceeding job requirements."

2. The U-S unemployment rate fell from 10 to 9.7 percent in January, but a Gallup poll out yesterday found that nearly one out of every five members of the country's workforce is underemployed. That's about 30 million Americans who are without jobs or unable to find full-time work.

3. NYT: "Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions. Roughly 2.7 million jobless Americans will lose their unemployment check before the end of April... unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments"

4. The Economist: God help the jobless

5. How business meetings are done at Google

6. Another Web 2.0 data-based (ad)-venture: Trendrr

Completing an Economics PhD in Five Years

Thanks to Christian for pointing out this paper published in the AER today (by Stock, Finegan and Siegfried). Endogeneity concerns aside, finishing your PhD within the designated time is positively affected by:

- larger 1st year PhD classes
- shared offices
- being male
- whether someone went to a top tier university for undergrad

Factors that have a negative effect are:

- doing your PhD with a top tier instution
- high attrition in the 2nd year
- pre-thesis research work requirement
- having an undergrad degree in economics

The authors conclude that "many considerations unique to individual students and faculty that we cannot measure—such as ambition, motivation, persistence, organizational skills, the creativity of students, and interest in students’ success as well as mentoring and motivational skills among graduate faculty—matter more than the myriad characteristics we were able to measure, which collectively account for less than 15 percent of the variation in completion among students."

Some insights on how non-cognitive personality constructs (such as ambition, motivation, persistence and organisation) apply to graduate education are provided in the Educational Assessmnet Journal (2005) by Patrick Kyllonen, Alyssa Walters and James Kaufman from the Princeton Educational Testing Service. We discussed this research on the blog before: here.

Stock and Siegfried (2006) reported on time-to-degree for economics Ph.D.'s in the United States in the AEA Papers and Proceedings. That research motivated me to consider that the duration of the Ph.D. process (or time-to-degree) may be a source of comparability problems in self-rated skills matching for Ph.D. graduates (see a previous post on skills-matching here).

The idea is that the more the individual has committed to the process of atatining a Ph.D., the more he or she will want to view the outcome of that process favourably. Taking a year longer during Ph.D. training implies a very particular opportunity cost. There is a precedent for this type of comparability-bias in the anchoring vignettes literature.

Buckley (2007) used the anchoring vignettes technique to investigate the "rose-coloured glasses" effect, which refers to parents reporting higher levels of satisfaction with a school solely or partially as a justification for the effort expended in the choice process. The analogy to 'time-to-degree' is about the amount of time expended in the Ph.D. process. (See a previous discussion of Buckley's research here).

The Matching of Educational and Occupational Structures

This study is described here as a replication of the study of the occupational structure of education in Ireland and the Netherlands (Borghans, Hughes & Smits 1997). It is suggested that there are "four types of factors accounting for the differences in the occupational profiles of basically similar educational programs":

1. Supply and demand in the labor market

2. Possibilities for substitution of qualifications and skills

3. Professional and governmental interests and regulations

4. Individual preferences and interpretations of the match

Computing Careers and Irish Higher Education: A Labour Market Anomaly

Simon Stephens
Letterkenny Institute of Technology

David O'Donnell
Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland

Paul McCusker
Letterkenny Institute of Technology

Industry & Higher Education, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007

Abstract:
This paper explores the impact of developments in the Irish economy and labour market on computing course development in the Irish Higher Education (HE) sector. Extant computing courses change, or new courses are introduced, in attempts to match labour market demands. The conclusion reached here, however, is that Irish HE is producing insufficient numbers of computing graduates notwithstanding the anomalous fact that the capacity to produce them is available in the Irish HE sector. Manpower planning is inefficient and IT skill shortages remain not as a result of poor industry/HE relations but because of a lack of understanding of Irish student perceptions, preferences and expectations. Pressures for radical institutional change are probably unlikely to emerge as skill gaps are being filled by immigrants with the requisite skills.

Keywords: computing, Irish higher education, manpower planning, skills shortages, student perceptions

Article here.

What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?

Following on my last blog-post on skills-matching, below is an excerpt from the song "What do you with a B.A. in English? and it Sucks to be Me" from the 2004 Tony winner of Best Musical, Avenue Q. Thanks to Sarah M for pointing this out to me, and don't forget, there are lots of things to do with a B.A. in English, including teaching and journalism.

"Bart, Don't Make Fun of Grad. Students, They Just Made a Terrible Life Choice"

Thanks to the Organizations and Markets Blog for pointing out this clip from the Simpsons where Bart explains graduate school. I can think of a few Matt Groening fans in Geary who should get a kick out of this. Another take on grad school by Groening is available here. While all of this may seem quite entertaining in cartoon sketches, we should bear in mind that there are some very serious aspects to Ph.D. graduates' skills-matching and the non-cognitive aspects of Ph.D. student persistence. These have been discussed on this blog before (follow the links). Also related is Lex Borghan's and Bart Golsteyn's (not Simpson!) work on "Skill Transferability, Regret and Mobility".

Skills-Matching During Recessions and Implications for Lower-Skilled Workers

On the New York Times blog Economix (Explaining the Science of Every Day Life), Princeton economist Alan Krueger has discussed the US job market for college graduates (here). Krueger raises the point that underutilisation of highly educated workers' skills should be a concern during periods of recession. He bases this on the idea that employers tend to be more selective in downturns - "the job situation is likely to weaken considerably for less-educated workers as the downturn persists, however, because employers are likely to raise skill requirements."

Krueger mentions research by UCD economist Paul Devereux, which finds that “the education levels of new hires within occupations are higher when the unemployment rate is high and this effect is more pronounced in lower-paying occupations.” Paul Devereux's paper "Occupational Upgrading and the Business Cycle" (Labour, 2003) is available here. The paper concludes with the idea that low-skilled individuals suffer most from recessions in terms of occupation quality and unemployment.

Why Would Subjective Measures of Skills-Matching Be Preferred Over Objective Measures?

Before I answer this question, I will remind readers that the idea of "matching" describes the extent of skills-match between Ph.D. training and subsequent employment (It's a different concept to over-education). Using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) `Survey of Doctorate Recipients' (SDR); Bender and Heywood (2006) report that approximately one-sixth of academics in the United States report some degree of mismatch. This mismatch is associated with substantially lower earnings, lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of turnover (Bender and Heywood, 2006). The question on `matching' in the SDR is collected because the (US) National Research Council made a demand for data that shows the extent of integration between "occupational detail and academic training" i.e. `skills-matching'.

The literature on skills-matching is small; there is at least one study using objective data, and a few more using self-reported data. Nordin, Persson and Rooth (2008) is a study that was already mentioned by me on the blog this week (see here). These authors add to the small literature on the consequences of (objective) skills-matching; they use microdata collected by Statistics Sweden, but are forced to drop 36 percent of their sample due to restrictions on fields of education to well-defined categories. The authors state that this approach is necessary because some fields of education (e.g. in the humanities and languages) are either vague or cannot easily be matched with any specific occupation. Also, the authors exclude a further 11 percent of their sample because of missing occupation data.

Robst (2007) discusses other instances where objective measures of skills-matching may be problematic. For example, "many college majors provide students with a broad range of skills... that apply to different occupations. It would be difficult to develop an algorithm for determining whether a major and a job are unrelated... individual assessments, while perhaps subjective, are expected to provide important information." One way around these problems is to use self-rated measures of skill-matching, augmented by the anchoring vignettes technique (see King et al; 2004: here) for enhancing the comparability of survey responses. I mentioned ongoing work on this here last week.

Does Skills Mismatch Lower Returns to Education?

A new IZA discussion paper by Nordin, Persson and Rooth (Education-Occupation Mismatch: Is There an Income Penalty?) "adds to the small literature on the consequences of education-occupation mismatches." The consequences of skills-matching and the measurement of skills-matching are issues that have been discussed on this blog a fair bit recently.

Nordin, Persson and Rooth use microdata from Statistics Sweden, but are forced to drop 36 percent of their sample due to restrictions on fields of education to well-defined categories. The authors state that this approach is necessary because some fields of education (e.g. in the humanities and languages) are either vague or cannot easily be matched with any specific occupation. Also, the authors exclude a further 11 percent of their sample because of missing occupation data. One way around these problems might be to use self-rated measures of skill-matching, from which wage penalties might be more accurately estimated.

Nordin, Persson and Rooth focus on the income penalty for field of education-occupation mismatches; they find that the penalty for such mismatches is large for both men and women. They also find that it is substantially larger than has been found for the US. Interestingly, the authors also control for cognitive ability and find that the "income penalty is not caused by ability, at least for Swedish men." The income penalty for men decreases with work experience which the authors suggest is an indication that education-specific skills and work experience are substitutes to some extent. "There is no evidence, though, that the mismatched individuals move to a matching occupation over time. Thus, for some, the income penalty seems to be permanent."