The quality of paid work has become an essential component of individuals’ well-being in modern-day capitalism, and there has been a surge in policy discourse surrounding the objective of ‘more and better jobs’ (as articulated by the OECD) or ‘decent work’ (as outlined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals) over the past two decades. Given the growing policy concern toward employment quality, coupled with the growing tertiary-educated population globally, exploring the wider benefits of higher education on the quality of individuals’ work life, beyond the well-documented earnings premium, has become crucial to better understanding existing inequalities in the labour market. As individuals increasingly value intangible benefits, e.g., work-life balance, above tangible benefits, e.g., wage, when choosing their careers, it is now time to consider a broader definition of graduates’ labour market outcomes with a concept of job quality.

The importance of job quality as graduates’ labour market outcomes

Job quality is a multi-dimensional concept comprising various aspects that contribute to fulfilling workers’ needs and expectations. Scholars and institutions often identify six or seven job quality domains, including earnings, job prospects, skills and discretion, social and physical environments, work intensity, and working time quality (or work-life balance). Despite the economic growth many countries experienced over recent decades, studies indicate that job quality has not necessarily improved over time. It is also important to note that job quality provides a distinct perspective on graduates’ labour market outcomes compared to the traditional measures, such as earnings and employment status alone. This can be observed in many countries including South Korea where earnings have increased between 2010 and 2020, but a majority of job quality indicators, including job prospects and working time quality, have worsened during the same period. It hence becomes crucial to adopt a broader definition of graduates’ labour market outcomes with the concept of job quality, which provides a deeper understanding of the realities and challenges faced by graduates.

Job quality premium in Europe

The analysis of job quality premiums for graduates in Europe reveals intriguing findings. Overall, graduates outperform non-graduates in five out of seven job quality domains: earnings, prospects, skills and discretion, physical environment, and social environment. The two interesting exceptions were work intensity and working time quality. In other words, non-graduates rather than graduates have lower work intensity and better working time quality. This provides us with an important policy implication as an exclusive focus on earnings fails to capture the comprehensive nature of job quality and the labour market outcomes. As the importance of flexibility and autonomy at work has been prominent in recent years, the lower work intensity and better working time quality of non-graduates raise an important question: Are we sure that graduates have better quality jobs compared to non-graduates?

What are the challenges? What should we do?

Despite the growing importance of job quality in both policy and research, governments lack national-level surveys including a full range of job quality variables, which make it difficult to detect and address any existing inequalities in graduates’ labour market outcomes. Furthermore, even in countries with national-level surveys including a full range of job quality variables, it is still hard to combine job quality information with either socio-biographical or socio-economic information. It is hence time for designers of general social surveys, labour force surveys, panels, or cohort studies to allocate more resources, e.g., survey space, to measuring job quality for graduates in work. It will be also important for social science to keep pace with the changes in job quality premium to better understand graduates’ labour market outcomes.