Overqualification, a notion with three definitions

The first definition compares the level of qualification with the level normally required for the job held. It produces high rates and depends entirely on the correspondence table adopted between qualifications and jobs.

Two families of methods coexist. The normative approach relies on a table drawn up in advance by experts; the statistical approach treats as normal the most frequent qualification in each occupation. The second follows the actual evolution of hiring, the first may contradict it.

Those tables age: the same job title today requires different qualifications from thirty years ago, which produces measured overqualification without any real change of situation.

The second definition compares a person's social position with that of their parents. It belongs to social mobility and is measured through destination tables in training and occupational qualification surveys.

French results show substantial mobility in volume, much of it structural: the reshaping of the job structure mechanically creates movement, independently of any social fluidity. Sociologists therefore distinguish observed mobility from fluidity, which measures relative chances for a given structure.

The third definition rests on feeling that one holds a job below what one could expect. It is measured by questionnaire and coincides only partly with the first two.

Camille Peugny's work on this subject shows that the feeling of downgrading is more widespread than objectively measured downgrading, and that it depends heavily on the comparison point the person chooses: their parents, their fellow students, or the position they themselves held a few years earlier.

The rise in qualification levels has been faster than that of the job structure over several decades, which produces a relative devaluation of credentials at constant job structure.

That mechanism is documented and explains part of the gap between expectations formed during study and the positions actually available on leaving it. Marie Duru-Bellat analysed it under the name of educational inflation, stressing the relative value of credentials rather than their content.

The thesis has its critics. Other work points out that a qualification still protects against unemployment and differentiates pay, which indicates that it keeps an absolute value even when its relative value declines.

The three definitions do not classify the same people, and published rates vary threefold depending on which is used. A person may be overqualified relative to their qualification without being downwardly mobile relative to their parents, and vice versa.

A public debate that does not state the definition used therefore lines up incomparable figures, a frequent situation on this precise subject. The useful question is not which figure is right, but which one answers the question being asked.