JESS Seminar: Who are the undereducated? Investigating the interplay of social origin and non-educational productive capacities in Great Britain and Germany

Undereducated employees work in jobs that typically require more education than they have. We analyse how the interplay of social background, i.e. class origin and migration history, personality characteristics, and cognitive ability makes some workers more likely to access positions supposedly beyond their qualifications. Our results suggest that undereducation often acts as a status preservation strategy for people from high SES backgrounds, who did not do well in school. We also find immigrant-advantage effects among some origin groups in the UK. Both immigrant and class origin effects are partially mediated by personality and cognitive ability. Our analysis suggests that it is “entrepreneurial types” with high cognitive ability, risk-affinity, an internal locus of control, reporting openness and extraversion, which are most likely to be successful through undereducation.