OVEREDUCATION IN GREECE

While much has been written lately on overeducation, little is known about the effect of socioeconomic background on the incidence of overeducation and its impact on earnings. In this paper, the question of socioeconomic background is taken up and estimates of the incidence and labor market impacts of overeducation are examined with data from Greece. It is estimated that 16 percent of the university educated labor force is overeducated, varying considerably by discipline. The proportion of those overeducated from the lower classes is high (54 percent), although this varies by specialization. Overall, there is a 10 percent "penalty" in earnings associated with being overeducated for a university graduate. The negative and statistically significant effect of overeducation affects those faculties that are more general and do not correspond to particular occupations. Overeducated workers are younger than those properly matched, and more likely to work in the private sector. This suggests that overeducation is a phenomenon that affects workers as they make their way through the labor market. It may also mean that overeducation is a new phenomenon, brought about by the oversupply of graduates. Frustrated graduates are forced to take jobs in inappropriate fields. And as public sector employment decreases in size and the numbers of university graduates increase, private sector employment will necessarily increase for graduates. The question then is whether the private sector can provide jobs that are appropriate to the qualifications of university graduates.     

Civic Education and the New American Patriotism Post-9/11

This study analyzes the theoretical and practical political frameworks behind the two main approaches to civic education in America, 'civics' and 'service'. The first focuses on educating students about the formal political process. It is associated with liberal political theory and also with a justice-oriented, distributive politics that in practice has increasingly become consumer-oriented--fights over 'who gets what'. The second, 'service' (or community service or service learning) is associated with communitarian political theory and also with politics known internationally as neo-liberalism or the 'Third Way'. Neither liberalism nor communitarianism has been able to mount a significant alternative to what editors of a recent CJE issue call 'educational Darwinism' in education, in which less powerful groups are losers; to the spread generally of marketplace ways of thinking in every arena of society; or to the increasingly militarist and unilateralist foreign policy of the United States and the UK. Only the articulation of a different politics--best described as populist or civic populist in the United States, and 'popular democratic' in South Africa and elsewhere--can generate the power, political energy, and vision of a serious alternative. Populist politics has a different definition of politics itself, including productive as well as distributive dimensions. It has a different view of civic education, focused on the habits of public work, the skills of empowerment, and democratic organizing for cultural change in government, as well as educational and other mediating institutions. Finally, it has a different foreign policy, based on a patriotism that is internationally oriented and cognizant of global interdependence.