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Employers regularly complain of a shortage of qualified scientists and advocate that to remain competitive more scientists need to be trained. However, using a survey of graduates from British universities, I report that 3 years after graduation less than 50% of graduates from science subjects are working in a scientific occupation.

Accounting for selection into major and occupation type, I estimate the wages of graduates and report that the wage premium of science graduates only occurs when these graduates are matched to a scientific occupation – and not because science skills are in demand in all occupations. I also provide additional evidence to assess whether science graduates are pushed or pulled into non-scientific occupations. Altogether, the evidence does not support the claim that science graduates are pulled by better conditions, financial or otherwise, into non-scientific jobs.

In this chapter, we aim to make the following contributions to the perceived overqualification literature. First, we provide an opportunity-based fairness conceptualization of perceived overqualification, and differentiate it from other justice constructs. Second, we present a multilevel model of perceived overqualification, which enumerates the antecedents and consequences, and explicates the mediators and moderators of the effect of perceived overqualification. Third, we emphasize the importance of considering methodological issues in future research on overqualification. Finally, we offer specific suggestions in studying applicant overqualification and recruiter perceptions.

This chapter discusses the main challenges in higher education comparative research, focusing on cross-national forms of comparison and presenting examples from European research. The first part stresses the importance of constructing concepts which can travel across countries. This part identifies the different vertical levels of comparison involved in higher education cross-national research, discussing how the need for exploring general patterns in higher education (e.g. globalisation and Europeanisation) is confronted with the importance of taking into account the diversity within the particular cases (e.g. institutional and individual experiences). The second part focuses on the equivalence of meaning in large-N (in particular, the Eurostudent and REFLEX datasets) and small-N studies, identifying the respective limits of the two forms of comparison. The chapter contends that comparative research in higher education could benefit from more collaboration between small-N qualitative comparativists and experts of large-N studies used in European policy-making.

The basic structure of Korea's formal education system is 6-3-3-4. This school system, which was established soon after its independence from Japan after World War II, has not been changed very much until recently. Primary education covers grades 1–6. Kindergarten has not been a part of the official school system until now, although making it a part of the pubic school system has been under discussion for some years. In the secondary education sector, there are two levels of schools: middle schools covering grades 7–9, and high schools covering grades 10–12. After 12 years of formal education, students advance to higher education. Typically, undergraduate degree (B.A. or B.S.) takes four years.

In the early 1980s, institutional and development researchers began to question why schools in different countries around the world increasingly appeared alike in formal design, organization, and function. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer (1985) offered a seminal neo-institutional argument that schools around the world are increasingly drawn up by the global sweep of modernization. A prerequisite for any country wishing to engage with and compete in the modern world, the authors argued, is establishing a system of mass schooling based on a set of core institutional standards and values that originated in the west but have since expanded around the globe. These standards and values require that schools be universally accessible and socially progressive, capably of equally and equitably integrating a citizenry – regardless of racial, ethnic, and gender-related distinctions – into the nation-state. The world model of education described by these theorists provides not so much an organizational blueprint for building modern school systems as a cultural schema for defining the national polity and forging a modern society through education. What makes schools everywhere look and act the same, they claim, is the utter invariability of this schema.[T]he striking thing about modern mass education is that everywhere in the world the same interpretative scheme underlies the observed reality. Even in the most remote peasant villages, administrators, teachers, pupils, and parents invoke these institutional rules and struggle to construct schools that conform to them. (p. 147)

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job–education mismatch among PhD holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while personnel employed in R&D activities is still below the European average. We use cross-sectional micro-data collected in 2009 and rely on different definitions of education–job mismatch such as, overeducation, overskilling, and dissatisfaction with the use of skills. We find that overeducation and skills dissatisfaction are associated with significantly lower wages but there is no wage penalty from overskilling. Furthermore, those who simultaneously report overeducation and skills dissatisfaction experience a particularly high wage penalty.

Culture is not new to the study of migration. It has lurked beneath the surface for some time, occasionally protruding openly into the discussion, usually under some pseudonym. The authors bring culture into the open. They are concerned with how culture manifests itself in the migration process for three groups of actors: the migrants, those remaining in the sending areas, and people already living in the recipient locations. The topics vary widely. What unites the authors is an understanding that though actors behave differently, within a group there are economically important shared beliefs (customs, values, attitudes, etc.), which we commonly refer to as culture. Culture and identity play a central role in our understanding of migration as an economic phenomenon; but what about them matters? Properly, we should be looking at the determinants of identity and the determinants of culture (prices and incomes, broadly defined). But this is not what is done. Usually identity and culture appear in economics articles as a black box. Here we try to begin to break open the black box.