All that glitters is not gold—Mixed early labour market outcomes of STEM graduates in Poland

Abstract

The expansion of higher education resulted in a growing interest in post-graduation labour market outcomes. Two conflicting narratives are present in the debate. The first focuses on the shortage of skills and the need for further expansion of the sector and seems to pertain mostly to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The second revolves around over-education and mismatch leading to graduate unemployment or underemployment. Such concerns pertain especially to humanities and social sciences. However, in this article, we argue that the STEM versus non-STEM opposition on which this debate is premised is not adequate for analysing post-graduation labour market outcomes. We leverage a unique administrative dataset comprising monthly records on the labour market status of the entire population of recent Polish university graduates (N = 161,323) to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the STEM category in terms of labour market outcomes and the limited predictive value of the field of study for those outcomes. We argue that the category is too broad and internally diverse to be used as an overarching category, especially in research meant to inform policymaking.