Effects of the Higher Education Expansion on Young Workers'' College Premium and Occupational Choices

• Main Authors: Ya-ting Huang, 黃雅婷
• Other Authors: Chiung-yu Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/42368200093002432122

碩士 === 南華大學 === 管理經濟學系經濟學碩士班 === 98 === 　　In Taiwan, the restriction on the establishment of universities had loosened since 1987. Since then the higher education system had been expanding rapidly. Comparing to the demand side adjustment of the labor market, an argument for “more and more college workers go into noncollege jobs” has been widely discussed. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore the issue of “Is the proportion of young college workers (18-33 years of age with less than or equal to 10-years labor market experience) in noncollege jobs increasing from 1993 to 2005 in Taiwan?” Due to the rapid technological innovation, the required skills of college and noncollege jobs also differ with time, therefore, we need to take this factor into account to make the classified jobs also vary with time when classifying jobs into college and noncollege types. This paper uses data from the 1992-2006 Surveys of Household Income and Expenditure, and refers to the qualitative classification method that is derived from the supply-demand model given by Gottschalk and Hansen (2003) and the subjective classification method utilized by Hecker (1992) to compute and define what the “college” and “noncollege” jobs are. Our results indicate that the trend of young workers’ college premium (i.e, the difference in log earnings between a college graduate and a noncollege graduate) is decreasing over time and the proportion of college workers in the occupation-specific jobs is gradually increasing. The negative relation between these two is for the reason that the increasing labor supply from college graduates causes their relative wages decrease. Furthermore, by using Logit and Probit models we find that, in Taiwan, the probability of young workers who possess university degrees but employ in noncollege jobs raises year by year, and the increasing rate become more acutely after 2002. This trend is contrary to the similar studies done for USA (1983-1994) and Portugal (1986-1999). The likely reason that our results trend differently with the others is that the innovation of Taiwan’s higher education system caused oversupply from college graduates while the labor market is incapable of absorbing this supply, consequently, the situation that college workers in noncollege jobs shaped up.