A critique often addressed to analyses of this type is that education is not a perfect measure of graduates’ skills. Indeed, measuring skills is challenging as they are often unobserved. education follows previous work in using information on the skill content of occupations, provided by the ONS.
Our underlying assumption is that the skill content qatar rcs data of occupations reveals more accurately the skill of graduates. Using information on different types of mismatch and skills, we can map all graduates over six skill types. At the top of the scale, we find fully matched graduates (Skill 1), while at the bottom we find low-skilled graduates in non-graduate jobs without a field of study match (Skill 6).
Our findings
Figure 1 presents the proportion of UK graduates, mapped over the six skill types. This shows that approximately 44% of graduates are perfectly matched, and employed in a graduate job which requires their degree field. About 23% percent are working in a graduate job that requires a different degree field (Skill 2), hence they are only horizontally mismatched. Using a terminology introduced by Chevalier, approximately 9% can be defined as genuinely mismatched as they have developed high level skills, but they are not in a typical graduate job (Skill groups 3 and 4); the remaining 23% of graduates are apparently mismatched because, despite holding a degree, they have not developed high level skills.