Causes and Consequences: Overeducated Chinese Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market

More than thirty years have passed since Richard Freeman’s influential bookThe Overeducated American(1976) described the growing tendency for workers to have more formal education than their jobs require, a tendency that Freeman suggested generated a pattern of declining returns to higher education within the United States. While a similar pattern was initially confirmed for Canada (see Dooley 1986), this trend seems to have been reversed more recently in both countries, and certainly so for younger workers (see Katz and Murphy 1992, Bar-Or et al. 1995 and Card and Lemieux 2001). Nevertheless, the extent of overeducation and its consequences