Overeducation and Ethnic Minorities in Britain

By H. Battu, Peter J. Sloane. Social Science Research Network, 2002

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines the utilisation of education across ethnic minorities in the UK. In particular, we examine the incidence of mismatch between educational qualifications and occupational attainment, the determinants of any mismatch and the consequences for earnings and other labour market outcomes. Using a modal measure of required education across sixty occupations we find that different ethnic groups have varying levels of over-education with the highest incidence being amongst the Indian and Africa-Asian groups. When we introduce controls we find that the African-Asians are more likely to be both over and under-educated relative to Indians (the omitted group), but this is reversed for those born in the UK. Foreign qualifications increase the likelihood of over-education for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis but reduce it for African-Asians. Language fluency increases the likelihood of mismatch. The results from our earnings regressions support previous work in relation to the returns to over, required and under-education, though with differences between native and immigrant non-whites.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c95336a0b2156bd9be269c28ba31a03d9f746cd

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Citations in the corpus

Immigrant overeducation: Evidence from recent arrivals to Australia (2007, background): “As a result, we have individuals 11Employment prospects for ethnic minorities in the UK appear to be closely related to access to transport (Battu and Sloane 2002, 2004). with assessed and non-assessed quali cations across all visa categories.”
Immigrant over-education: evidence from Denmark (2007, unknown): “These findings fit well with other studies which consider immigrants with foreign-acquired qualifications such as Battu and Sloane (2004) and Lindley and Lenton (2006).”
Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain (2012, background): “…qualifications, they tend to be over-represented in other occupations where their credentials might be of less value, with the result that they are over-qualified for the work they do; they will tend to be better paid than those who are not over-qualified (Battu and Sloane, 2004; Hartog, 2000).”
The Over-Education of UK Immigrants and Minority Ethnic Groups: Evidence from the Labour Force Survey (2009, background): “Exceptions include Battu and Sloane (2004), as well as Dex and Lindley (2007) who focus on ethnic differences.”
I’m too clever for this job: a bivariate probit analysis on overeducation and job satisfaction in Australia (2008, background): “These results largely match previous findings on the differences between the overeducated and non overeducated in Australia (Battu and Sloane, 2004; Kler, 2005a; Voon and Miller, 2005; Kler, 2006; Green et al., 2007).”
Poverty and ethnicity in the UK (2007, background): “Evidence of ‘over-qualification’ from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities suggested that minority ethnic groups were not getting appropriate returns to qualifications, and that this was true across the minority ethnic groups (Battu and Sloane, 2004).”
Overeducation and Mismatch in the Labor Market (2011, unknown): “Ethnicity The number of studies inquiring the relation between ethnicity and overschooling is limited (Green et al. (2007) and Battu et al. (2004) are exceptions).”