Abstract
Recent studies of trends in relative wage rates and unemployment rates are reviewed. These studies conclude that real wages of recent college graduates rose substantially during the 1980s while the wages of recent high school graduates fell, contradicting the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) claim that college graduates were oversupplied during the 1980s. The BLS approach to measuring the supply–demand balance for college graduates by counting the number of college graduates who say they are working in “nontraditional” occupations is dismissed as invalid because of the unreliability of Current Population Survey coding of occupation and education and the lack of attention to mismatches of the opposite kind such as the more than 5% of physicians, lawyers, and high school teachers who report having fewer than 16 years of schooling.
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