Should we worry that college graduates are "underemployed"?

Last week The Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation released, Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward . The report’s key finding, that: “Among workers who have earned a bachelor’s degree, only about half secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation, and the other half are underemployed–that is, working in jobs that do not require a degree or make meaningful use of college-level skills,” (3) was picked up, uncritically, by many media outlets.? Those stories (see here , and here , and here ) often cited this story as part of the narrative, beloved by the Biden Administration and the GOP (for different reasons), that the value of a college education is dubious and declining.?

The report is deeper than its coverage, and the statistics about the sectors in which college graduates work, their compensation, and their progress over time, are worth paying attention to. But for all the statistics, the report does a poor job of examining the meaning of its own findings.? Here are some questions it ought to ask:

Is it true that a large portion of college graduates are underemployed? If you accept the definition of underemployment and the methodology that generated the findings (a statistical analysis of job postings, job classifications by the Department of Labor, and generalizations about what is a “college-level skill”) then, yes.?

But if you were to ask college graduates, “Do you use skills you learned in college in your job?” certainly more than 50% would say yes. Or if you asked hiring agents, “Did a college degree influence your decision to hire this person?” again the answer in more than 50% of cases would be yes. On the other hand, if you asked college graduates, “Does your job use all of your skills, training and talents?”? (or, in other words, if you used a common-sense definition of “underemployment”), then certainly more than 50% of college graduates would say no. And if you asked supervisors of college graduates, “does your employee perform at the level you would expect of a college graduate?” the answer would, again, frequently be “no.”???

In short, the level of employment and the role of a college degree in hiring and job performance are much more complicated than the definition of underemployment in Talent Disrupted permits.

Is it bad that a large portion of college graduates are underemployed? The report does point out that college graduates in non-college level jobs earn, on average, 25% more than their colleagues without a college degree.? Nonetheless, the report’s thrust is that college graduates should work in college-level jobs and if they don’t, it is a problem. Its first key finding, for instance, is that “Underemployment is a large and persistent problem.” (6) And the report notes with specificity the sorts of jobs that are signs of “severe underemployment”: “jobs that typically require only a high school education or less, such as jobs in office support, retail sales, food service, and blue-collar roles in construction, transportation, and manufacturing.” (12)

Now if a college graduate wants a job that requires a college degree and cannot obtain that job, it is a problem. And some of that problem may have to do with their college training while some certainly has to do with the industry in which they hope to work, (something that gets almost no attention in the report). But it is unlikely that society would be better off if college graduates worked only in “college-level jobs.” Similarly, if college graduates were excluded from “office support, retail sales, food service and blue-collar roles in construction, transportation, and manufacturing,” (12) or if they systematically avoided the number one field for underemployment “community and social service” (35) one might think that society and the economy were less healthy than they are now, not more.

If it is a problem, can we fix it? The report’s recommendations for responding to the problem seem unlikely to respond to the problem.? Researchers found that students who had paid internships were less likely to be underemployed than those who did not complete a paid internship.? So, their top recommendation is to “enable every student to have access to at least one paid internship.” (42)? This is certainly the case of misunderstanding cause and effect.? Employers that offer paid internships are typically in sectors where a college-degree is de rigueur or are hiring for jobs where a degree is required.? The paid internship does not change the nature of the job. Rather, the job demands a paid internship.? Or put another way, a paid internship for a job in “community and social service” does not make the job a college-level job.??

The other recommendations both seem unlikely to change the current situation and assume that college students lack access to information that they, in fact, already have.? I suspect, for instance, that few college students would make different job decisions if they had “access to clear employment outcomes by college and degree program, with earnings and occupation data included (recommendation 2)” (43) if only because most students already have a good sense of what people earn in the fields that interest them. Similarly, most colleges offer at least decent career planning support (Recommendation 3).? And few students are excluded from “degree programs that lead to well-compensated college-level employment” (Recommendation 4).?

?In short, the report’s recommendations seem unlikely to change the situation that concerns the authors.? And the only recommendation that would change the situation, requiring college graduates to work only in “college-level jobs,” would be both immoral and infeasible.

Should we fix the “underemployment problem”? Working in a bad job is a bad thing. Being overqualified for your job or being in a dead-end job is financially limiting and demoralizing. And where those things exacerbate existing inequities in American society, they are bad, too, for the community. If educators and employers can reduce those problems, they should.

It is also true, though, that human beings, including college graduates, choose jobs on the basis of constraints, desires, hopes, values, and relationships that have little to do with whether a job is “college-level.”?

People choose jobs because they are tied to a place, or because they have a talent for certain tasks, or because they know someone at the employer, or because they want to help their families, or because the job popped up at the right time, or because they want time for? experiences that matter more to them than the amount of compensation and the educational requirements of the position they hold.

These are all proper roles for work in the life of human beings. They are not problems to be fixed. An analysis that takes the data sophistication of Talent Disrupted and marries it to a consideration of why college graduates do the work they do would help colleges and employers do better by the students we serve and the people we hire.