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Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers: They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates and less-educated technical school graduates.

The purpose of this study is to explore pre-employment college graduates’ relocation tendencies based on a research framework built upon gender and cultural theories.

Relocation decisions were analyzed based on 208 college graduates enrolled in public universities in Texas, USA.

The relocation decision-making by college graduates differ from that for corporate employees described in previous research. First, the willingness to relocate increases as the college graduates mature. Second, gender difference in the willingness to relocate is non-significant because of the same expected norms for both genders. Instead, psychological gender affiliation, such as self-perceived masculinity, makes a difference in relocation decisions. Third, family-related variables, such as marital status and parenthood, do not influence college graduates’ relocation decisions. Last, cultural groups do not exhibit any overall significant differences.

The findings provide new and complementary knowledge over previous relocation studies.

The findings enhance the understanding of career choices made by college graduates in their early career, offering valuable managerial implications in crafting staffing strategies and improving human resource management for organizations in today’s fast-changing, vibrant multi-cultural environment.

The study is focused on pre-employment relocation decision-making by college graduates from different demographic backgrounds. The study fills a major research void in relocation studies by clarifying the relocation patterns of new employees graduating from college.

The USA’s higher education leaders and professional organizations have called for increased professional development programming at graduate colleges to better prepare US graduate students for their future careers. This study aims to investigate the demographic characteristics of graduate students participating in co-curricular professional development (PD) and sociocultural development (SD) programming at a graduate college at a large, selective and research-intensive public university in the Midwestern USA.

Using institutional data from six semesters, the authors examined the characteristics of students that attended the graduate college’s programs at one university. The authors analyzed which students were most likely to attend PD and SD programs using multinomial logistic regression models.

Female students, students from US historically marginalized racial groups, and US Pell Grant recipients (low-income students) were found to have a higher likelihood of attending both PD and SD programs at the centralized graduate college.

The findings will be of interest to graduate deans and educators who support graduate students. Further evaluative research on the usefulness of such programs at other institutions would help graduate colleges better understand the role they play in meeting graduate students’ needs.

The findings contribute to the understanding of the important role of the US graduate college in the development of graduate students. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study to evaluate the backgrounds of graduate students who pursue co-curricular PD and SD opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of first-generation college graduates in the USA, as they transitioned from higher education into employment in the private sector. First-generation college graduates are from families in which neither parent had a bachelor’s degree.

This paper used phenomenology to gain an understanding of the transition experiences of first-generation college graduates employed within the corporate sector.

First-generation status influences the experiences of students beyond college and limits their awareness of and access to graduate employment. Lack of college education in the family affects the graduates’ career decision-making, familiarity with corporate culture and expectations, preparedness for the corporate sector and restricted access to people with the ability to ease their entry into the sector. These translate into transition outcomes such as starting at entry-level positions not requiring a college degree, delayed access to graduate-level positions, having to engage intentionally in additional efforts to reach graduate-level positions and potential to be discriminated against during the recruitment process, albeit unintentionally.

Is first-generation status yet another structural contextual factor that influences career decision self-efficacy? Is the influence of FG status common across sectors? Longitudinal studies need to be conducted across sectors, regions and countries.

There is a need to sensitize faculty and career service staff to career-related challenges of first-generation students and for programs and policies that increase awareness of these students regarding professional environments and expectations. There are social justice implications for recruitment strategies and overcoming discrimination.

This paper explored first-generation college graduates’ experiences, an issue hitherto not explored in depth.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the college-to-work transition as experienced by first-generation college (FGC) graduates. First-generation graduates are often adjusting to workplaces that are significantly different from parents’ work environments.

This phenomenological study explored the early-career learning experiences of six FGC graduates from the USA. All participants were working full-time and had graduated two to six years earlier.

Three themes were identified: starting the job, being in the job, and releasing the past. Participants highlighted unanticipated aspects of their college-to-work transition, including dealing with workplace politics and family dynamics. They also described ambivalence between their current work and the desire to pursue a more compelling career or vocational passion.

All participants were white and from similar (rural) settings in one region of the USA. The qualitative nature of the study restricts generalization.

This study suggests, given the distinction between first-generation students’ post-college work environments and that of their parents, that educators’ efforts to assist FGC students might appropriately extend to topics beyond graduation. FGC graduates should be alerted to the impact of shifts in social and cultural norms, and informed about changing family dynamics that may continue after leaving school.

Previous research has highlighted the challenges facing FGC students. This is one of few studies that explores the experiences of FGC graduates in the workplace following graduation.

Using a unique data set from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), we estimate the gender starting-salary gap for college graduates from 2000 to 2010. Simulation techniques are used to estimate how the salary gap would change if women had selected the same majors or job types as men. We find that about 90% of the starting-salary gap is explainable by gender differences in majors and types of job offers – a higher percentage than found in most other studies. Duncan indexes of dissimilarity also indicate that the gender distributions of job offers by college major and type of first jobs have not become more similar over the past 10 years. Although differences in college major and types of first jobs explain most of the gender gap in starting salaries of college graduates, small but unexplained gender pay differences reveal themselves in the NACE statistics.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

The purpose of this paper is to assess how wages of US native workers with various educational backgrounds are affected by immigration.

This paper estimates the responses of these workers’ wages to the concentration of immigrants with various educational backgrounds in their local labour markets, using 1980‐2000 US Census data and instrumental variables approach.

Wages of native high school dropouts fall slightly in the presence of immigrant high school dropouts and high school graduates; wages of native high school graduates fall slightly in the presence of immigrant high school graduates, but rise in the presence of immigrants with higher levels of education; wages of native workers with some college education fall slightly with larger concentrations of immigrant high school graduates but rise slightly with larger concentrations of immigrant college graduates; and there is no evidence that wages of native college graduates are affected by immigration.

No previous studies have considered these possibilities when assessing the impact of immigration on native workers’ wages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Graduate Certificates in colleges in Ontario, Canada, and their distinctive ability to generate intrinsic student engagement in specialized skills development, and a culture of progression and scholarship.

This is a review of selected literature on student engagement. While extrinsic motivation, such as employment, has most often been discussed this paper purposefully considers intrinsic motivation and factors that build deeper engagement in students. This paper compares and contrasts the literature, and its link with the features of the Ontario College Graduate Certificate in Canada. More specifically, it examines the background and development of the credential in the context of the movement towards competency-based education.

This paper postulates that colleges can uniquely provide applied and intrinsically engaging programming through credentials like the Graduate Certificate. The Graduate Certificate helps heighten graduate skills engagement, a culture of progression and scholarship, and ultimately competitiveness in today’s workplace.

The findings of this paper have implications for colleges to distinguish themselves amongst post-secondary institutions as providers of specialized skills development in higher education, especially as competency-based education grows in importance. It also puts in to question how this type of engaging design can be further built in to post-secondary graduate curriculum.

This paper illuminates innovative practice at the post-graduate level, as an example of a skills-based scholarly activity. It helps position colleges as providers of effective, competency and outcomes-based higher education. This paper can add value to practitioners looking to build similar programming, by combining this Graduate Certificate design with evidence-based factors that build student engagement, particularly intrinsic motivation.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.