Can the world be over-educated?

Higher education has expanded greatly in OECD countries in the past few decades, and the result as expected has been a rise in the number of graduates. But has the increasing supply of well-educated labor been matched by the creation of an equivalent number of high-paying jobs? Or will more and more people with university degrees simply have to work for the minimum wage? Thanks to insightful new data, this year's Education at a Glance gets to the bottom of this issue in a way that was not possible in the past. A key lesson is that there are substantial rewards associated with attaining tertiary education and substantial penalties associated with failing to reach at least the upper secondary standard. The lesser qualified are not crowded out from the labor market as one might expect, whereas there appear to be better employment opportunities even for lower educated groups when more people enter higher education.