Horowitz Jonathan
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Am Sociol Rev. 2018;83(4):771-801. doi: 10.1177/0003122418785371. Epub 2018 Jul 9.
What is the worth of a college degree when higher education expands? The relative education hypothesis posits that when college degrees are rare, individuals with more education have less competition to enter highly-skilled occupations. When college degrees are more common, there may not be enough highly-skilled jobs to go around; some college-educated workers lose out to others and are pushed into less-skilled jobs. Using new measurements of occupation-level verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills, this study tests the changing effect of education on skill utilization across 70 years of birth cohorts from 1971 to 2010, net of all other age, period, and cohort trends. Higher-education expansion erodes the value of a college degree, and college-educated workers are at greater risk for underemployment in less cognitively demanding occupations. This raises questions about the sources of rising income inequality, skill utilization across the working life course, occupational sex segregation, and how returns to education have changed across different life domains.
高等教育扩张时，大学学位的价值何在？相对教育假说认为，当大学学位稀缺时，受教育程度更高的个体进入高技能职业的竞争较小。当大学学位更为普遍时，可能没有足够的高技能工作岗位供所有人选择；一些受过大学教育的工人会输给其他人，从而被迫从事技能要求较低的工作。本研究使用职业层面语言、定量和分析技能的新测量方法，在排除所有其他年龄、时期和队列趋势的情况下，测试了1971年至2010年出生队列70年间教育对技能利用的变化影响。高等教育扩张侵蚀了大学学位的价值，受过大学教育的工人从事认知要求较低职业时就业不足的风险更大。这引发了关于收入不平等加剧的根源、整个工作生涯中的技能利用、职业性别隔离以及不同生活领域教育回报如何变化等问题。
