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Thanks to a friend, I ran across Danielle Kurtzleben's 4 June 2014 Vox piece "Being Overeducated in Your First Job Hurts You Later in Your Career." In the piece, Kurtzleben reports research coming from North Carolina that asserts the negative impacts of holding jobs for which the worker is "overqualified" early in the worker's working life. While they are not as pronounced in the short term as those of unemployment, they are of far longer duration; the article arrives at the conclusions that taking any available job simply to have a job is not likely in the individual worker's best interest and that the effects on those workers are likely to continue for some time, inhibiting economic growth among those who actually go to do the work. Kurtzleben also helpfully points out the areas in which the research is deficient. No single study can account for all ideas, certainly, but the acknowledgement that there is more to be said on the matter limits the claims of the article, making it a better bit of reporting than that which presumes to be the definitive word on an idea.

I was not overeducated in my first jobs. Working with my great uncle on construction sites in my early teen years was a helpful experience for me (and I think I would be making more money at this point had I continued in that regard and become an electrician, although I would not be as comfortable in the day-to-day performance of my job duties). Working as a grocery store cashier during high school and into college was, as well, and each was suited to my level of achievement and the need to confine myself to part-time work while I was conducting my studies. Similar was my later work in food-service (at which I excelled, although I entertain no fantasies about returning to it). But I would be overeducated for such jobs now, and in areas not really conducive to them. Such is the danger of pursuing graduate education in the humanities, as I and many whom I know did. Absent an academic career or the fortunate happenstance of a skilled job opening in a company with which the worker had earlier experience, employment prospects are not good--and even with them, they are not good. Kurtzleben suggests that employers might react against the overeducated; my experience, and what I have seen of the experiences of those close to me, suggests that the "might" is many times "do." It is not only in first jobs that being overeducated can damage; it is in later jobs, as well, when the lines of work that ask for such attainment play out and the need to find some work to do--because the bills must be paid--drives the search for any job, and few if any are forthcoming.

I do not (often) regret my choice to go to graduate school. I do not (often) regret taking the time to earn my doctorate. But I increasingly see reason for such regret. And I do not know that I can resist the feeling.