Social class and university graduates’ overqualification: testing two mediated relationships

Abstract

[EN] University graduates’ overqualification (i.e., having more education, qualification and/or skills than one’s job requires) has important negative consequences. However, much less is known about its antecedents. This represents an important gap in the literature. In order to fill this gap, the goal of this study is to test a mediational model on the antecedents of university graduates’ overqualification (OQ). We posit that social class is negatively related to OQ through two mediational links: a) via social capital, and b) via social capital and tolerance towards OQ. The results obtained in a sample of 144 university graduates provided support for the second mediational link, so that social class was positively related to social capital, which in turn was negatively related to tolerance towards OQ, which in turn was positively related to graduates’ OQ. The results obtained uncover some of the antecedents of OQ and suggest that increasing social capital may be a way to decrease graduates’ OQ.