Education Expansion And The Degree Mismatch Of College Graduates

This paper utilizes the China’s higher education expansion policy conducted in 1999 as an exogenous shock,designs a quasi-natural experiment by using age cohorts and academic qualifications as identification strategies to construct a difference-in-difference model,which aims to evaluate the impact of the expansion policy on education-job matching of college graduates in the labor market.The result s based on the self-assessment method show that after the implementation of the expansion policy,the size of the group of underempl oyed college graduates has continued to increase,and the group with master degree and above has the highest job downward mismatch rate.After we di vide the samples into three groups by their job mismatch degree,it is found that the individual with the un dergraduate degree or above are mostly mild mismatched.The DID estimate results show that the higher education expansion policy significantly incre ase the education-job downward mismatch of college graduates by 39.3 percent;the impact on the undergraduat e degree group is higher than the impact on associate college graduates,and the proportion of moderate and mild mismatch increased more significant ly,especially the mild mismatch group;then we divide the samples into sub-samples and do the same regression by gender,firm characteristics,region and so on,the results show that the policy has more larger influence on the male than the female,and th e proportion of downward mismatches of SMEs is higher.The impact is even larger among the tertiary industry,and more obvious influence is founded in the more developed regions such as central and east.The research shows that since the higher education expansion,China ’s labor market employment problems have become increasingly prominent,not only reflect in the decline of education returns or premiums,but also presented as the education-job mismatch.The human capital of college graduates is not fully utilized,and the labor market resource allocation is inefficient.To this end,the quality of higher educat ion should be further enhanced to improve the competitiveness of college students in the labor market,which is a breakthrough point and way out to solve the employment problem of college graduates and promote China’s higher education reform.