ArticleAmerican sociological review2018
Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree.
Article in American sociological review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Longitudinal Effects of Academic Performance on Depression and Subjective Well-Being Among Students in China's Elite Universities.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A National Dyadic Study of Spousal Education and Hypertension Among Older Couples in the United States.Research on aging · 2025Article
- For Whom Does Education Convey Health Benefits? A Two-Generation and Life Course Approach.Journal of health and social behavior · 2024Article
- The gap-closing estimand: A causal approach to study interventions that close disparities across social categories.Sociological methods & research · 2024Article
- A national longitudinal dyadic analysis of spousal education and cognitive decline in the United States.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Does expansion of college education benefit urban entrepreneurship and innovation in China?Heliyon · 2023Article
- Highly Educated Black Americans Report Higher than Expected Perceived Job Demands.Journal of rehabilitation therapy · 2023Article
- The Network Structure of Occupations: Fragmentation, Differentiation, and Contagion.AJS; American journal of sociology · 2022Article
- Profiles in conspiracism: Associations with two psychiatric syndromes, religiosity and pandemic-related health behaviors.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Vertical Education-Occupation Mismatch and Wage Inequality by Race/Ethnicity and Nativity among Highly Educated US Workers.Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
What is the worth of a college degree when higher education expands? The relative education hypothesis posits that when college degrees are rare, individuals with more education have less competition to enter highly-skilled occupations. When college degrees are more common, there may not be enough highly-skilled jobs to go around; some college-educated workers lose out to others and are pushed into less-skilled jobs. Using new measurements of occupation-level verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills, this study tests the changing effect of education on skill utilization across 70 years of birth cohorts from 1971 to 2010, net of all other age, period, and cohort trends. Higher-education expansion erodes the value of a college degree, and college-educated workers are at greater risk for underemployment in less cognitively demanding occupations. This raises questions about the sources of rising income inequality, skill utilization across the working life course, occupational sex segregation, and how returns to education have changed across different life domains.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.