To measure underemployment, we utilize data from the
U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network
(O*NET). O*NET contains information on job-related
requirements for hundreds of occupations, collected from
interviews of incumbent workers and with input from professional
occupational analysts. We use the following question
from the O*NET Education and Training Questionnaire to
determine whether an occupation requires a college degree:
“If someone were being hired to perform this job, indicate
the level of education that would be required.” We consider a
college education to be a requirement for a given occupation if
at least 50 percent of the respondents working in that occupation
indicated that a bachelor’s degree is necessary to perform
the job. We then merged these data on the educational requirements
for each occupation with data from the decennial Census,
American Community Survey, and Current Population Survey
on individual workers and their occupations. A college graduate
is considered underemployed if he or she is working in an
occupation that does not typically require a bachelor’s degree.