The Expansion of Higher Education and Overeducation in Taiwan: Evidence from 1997 to 2007

Abstract

Abstrac-Higher education in Taiwan underwent rapid development over the past two decades. This research adopted the resultsof the survey on the present state of human resources conducted by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics to investigate the influence of overeducation on the human resource market. This study incorporated multiple methods of calculating overeducation to investigate the inconsistencies between the results and the explanations for these.Results showed that the rate of overeducation did not show much variation in the past decade according to both the standard deviation method and the modal method and that the findings conformed to the statistical results of past domestic studies. The salary regression model provided a good explanatory effect of overeducation and undereducation, and was conducive to the explanation and analysis of education level effects on salary. The standard deviation method was comparatively more effective than the modal method in calculating the rate of overeducation. This is related to the looser definition of adequate education in the standard deviation method.