Objective
1. Objectives The proposed project analyses the consequences of the increasing number of post secondary education graduates on the functioning of labour markets in five European countries, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. It also includes a systematic comparison with the situation in the United States of America, which, due to the different development and regulation of its higher education system, provides a contrasting reference scenario for evaluating policy options and implications for Europe. A multi-national will conduct the research and multi-disciplinary group of research teams that include sociologists, economists, management experts, as well as statisticians specialized in studying the education - employment nexus. The proposed project duration is 30 months. The proposed project relates to area two of the third call for TSER proposals: Research on Education and Training. As such the project fits in with the general objective to improve the common state of knowledge about education and training in Europe and to provide policy relevant information for the different actors and decision-makers involved in education systems. Specifically, the proposed research addresses the issue of the effectiveness of education policies in serving the needs of the economy. The project, therefore, directly relates to theme II.
3) "Education & Training and Economic Development" of the call for proposals, and then to task II.
4) 'Education &Training and Economic Growth" but also offers strong links to task II. l 'Lifelong Learning . The core theme of the project are the interactions between the growing social demand for education, changes in national education systems, and the functioning of labour markets. The project consists of a cross-country comparison of these interactions. In as much as it focuses on the education -employment nexus and education is a powerful determinant of individual labour market success, the project is also relevant for issues addressed under theme III of the TSER programme. Over the past decades, all European countries have experienced a significant rise in formal educational attainment levels due to a strong increase in post-compulsory and specifically post-secondary education participation. This process has been a pervasive phenomenon, although its dynamics and configurations have varied according each country's specific historical evolution, culture, and education policies. In response to the growing social demand for education, national education systems have undergone substantial transformations which, in turn, have fueled increasing education participation. At the same time, most European countries have witnessed a strong increase in the number of jobs requiring higher-level skills which in many cases, however, falls short of - at least in quantitative terms - fully accounting for the rise in educational attainment levels of the labour force. This is manifested by the fact that the shift towards higher-level skill requirements has been accompanied by a strong increase in unemployment specifically of young labour market entrants which has also affected those with higher-level educationcredentials among them.
These developments raise a set of questions: First, do the observed growing discrepancies indicate increasing structural mismatches between skillssupply and demand in the sense that a growing number of labour market entrantshave acquired the wrong type of skills ? Or do they indicate that skills supplyhas been outpacing skills demand ('overeducation') ? Certainly, education and education policies alone cannot guarantee a successful integration ofyoungsters into jobs. However, countless studies have reaffirmed that education investments are closely related to employment and economic growth. In order toprovide an answer to the above questions, it is therefore necessary to analyze the links between education and employment and the diffusion of competencesacquired through education within the economy from a crosscountry comparativeperspective taking into account the specific institutional configurations ofeducation systems and labour markets in each country. From a policy perspective, the above developments raise the issue of the 'social construction' and dynamics of the continuing trend towards longereducation participation and higher education credentials and the ensuing increase in the number of highly educated workers in the labour market. It hasbeen argued that the pervasive trend towards longer education participation and higher educational attainment levels in Europe, which gained signilicantly inmomentum during the 1980s, has for long rested on an implicit consensus betweenthe different parties and actors involved in the process: (i) reflecting thestrong credentialist element in most European labour markets, youngsters, incompeting for scarce jobs, have been induced to aspire to ever higher educationcredentials in order to improve their prospects of being hired into employment;(ii) employers, in turn, have an interest in hiring as many highly educatedworkers as possible, all the more so when higher skills acquired through education mean productivity improvements and are provided free of charge;(iii) policy makers, finally, in order to prevent adverse responses from voters, strive to keep youth unemployment rates low (through 'parking' youth in the education system) and are reluctant to infringe upon the concept of free access to education. The ensuing increase in the supply of more and more highly educated labourmarket entrants in a situation of persisting high unemployment has necessarily had important effects on the rules and criteria governing access to employment, the functioning of labour markets, and on firms' utilization of skilled labour. It can be hypothesized, however, that over long, however, these changes inthe mechanisms governing the allocation of workers to jobs are likely to call into question the very implicit consensus that has engendered them, as actors'modify their strategic orientations and options.
This calling-into-question of the original consensus underlying the education expansion is likely to takedifferent forms in the different countries.Identifying the potential breaking points of the consensus requires (a) aanalysis of the development and specific configurations of the'education-employment nexus' in different countries, (b) a better understandingof the behavior of employers vis-a-vis the increase in highly educated laboursupply, and (c) empirically-based medium-term projections which take intoaccount the directions of observable general trends, their shaping byinstitutions and the latter's inherent inertia, as well as the varying dynamicsof the different national education and employment systems. These three pointsdescribe the prime objectives of the proposed research. Within this framework, the cross-country comparative perspective of the research serves the purpose ofboth sharpening our understanding of national developments and trajectories andof providing guidelines for designing appropriate public education policies atthe national and Community levels. 03
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
- social sciencessociologysocial issuesunemployment
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
31042 Toulouse
France