The Human Effects of Underemployment

More and more workers in the United States are unable to use their educational background on the job. Such underemployment has been documented but not fully explored or analyzed. This paper examines the effects of underemployment on 32 low-level clerical workers, comparing their educational backgrounds with their at-titudes and behaviors. Higher education produces increased job dissatisfaction, higher turnover rates, reduced job involvement, impaired co-worker relations, and more emphasis on future aspirations. However, clerical workers of all educational backgrounds are prone to feelings of overqualification and complaints about the nature of workplace control. I relate these findings to existing theories on underemployment. Relying on educational expansion as a means of social and individual advancement has begun to have diminishing returns, and perhaps counterproductive results, in the United States. The phenomenon of overeducation/underemployment, understood as inadequate use of education on the job, has become more pronounced in the last two decades. Documenting its intensifica-tion, however, is complicated by the fact that defining underemployment is not a simple or