The education-job mismatch among Italian PhD graduates

Abstract

The over-skilling occurs when the skill of workers is higher than the one required by a given occupation. This phenomenon has assumed an increasing dimension and it is apparently not compatible with today’s knowledge society. In recent years, the under-utilization of human capital have raised growing concern both in Italy and in Europe given the negative effects both on the economic and social investment returns at individual and collective level (Oecd, 2016). In particular, a productive system such as the Italian one, characterized by a high fragmentation and traditional activities, often seems unable to offer an adequate number of qualified jobs and suitable career progressions, bringing more and more individuals, especially the most educated youth, to migrate abroad. The paper focuses the analysis on the education-job mismatch among the PhD holders as their growing number has raised concerns about the negative consequences of their misallocation in the labour market, worsened by the saturation of the academic job market. Drawing data from the recent survey conducted by Istat in 2018 on two PhDs cohorts, the paper aims to shed more light on the correlates and on the consequences of the mismatch.