Are Second Generation Immigrants More Overeducated Than Natives? a Comparison Between France and the United States

This article proposes an empirical comparison of the overeducation situation faced by natives and second generation immigrants in France and in the United States. Overeducation stands for an excess of education with respect to the occupation of the worker. In other words, the job does not fully make use of the worker’s skills acquired through education. Using Trajectoires et Origines for France and the Current Population Survey for the United States, we construct two measures of overeducation: a statistical one and a normative one.

The literature emphasizes on differences in educational attainment to explain the persistence of ethnic inequalities on labor markets. While it is empirically less significant, differences in educational returns raise major economic and social issues: these inequalities are inefficient economically but also lead to social tensions. It seems consequently crucial to understand them correctly.

The question of the measure of overeducation is tricky. Three measures are commonly used in the literature. First of all, a subjective measure depict workers’ feelings towards potential inadequacies. Second a normative classification can be constructed for each country, associating a diploma to each occupation. And finally a statistical analysis of overeducation describes the most frequent diploma to have for each specific profession and computes a table according to these associations. We follow this method, as well as the second one, to compare overeducation for our two populations.

No empirical studies have been devoted to the comparison of overeducation between natives and second generation immigrants in the two countries. Our results show that overeducation is more frequent in the United States. In terms of differences, overeducation is higher for second generation immigrants than for natives in France. On the contrary, analysis sheds light on the relative absence of origin-based disparity in the United States (where the racial disparity seems to prevail instead). However these inequalities are heterogeneous according to the origin. It concerns mainly North African second generation immigrants in France while in the United States, it is particularly Mexican second generation immigrants who are overeducated. Analyzing the main determinants of overeducation situations reveals that origin is a major factor of educational differences, which later on leads to differences in terms of overeducation. The econometric analysis also assesses the selection process occurring at the entry into the labor market. A final section discusses the potential institutional determinants of overeducation and of differences among the population.