Understanding the Effectiveness of Higher Education System: Evidences from Market Outcomes of Early University Graduates in Seven European Countries

Being enlightened by Richard Florida's seminal work on the creative class, this paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of higher education institutions to cultivate a workforce with utilised skills that meet the demand of labour market in the context of sustainable socio-economic development. Based on the macro and micro data generated from Eurostat and the Europe Labour Force Survey (EU LFS), the supply and demand condition of early graduates and the mismatch rate between early graduates' education backgrounds and actual jobs they undertook are estimated by a multinomial logit model in seven European countries. The findings suggest that, (1) higher education has a significant impact on the formation of specific sustainability competencies that contribute to the development of creative economy; (2) many creative workers also have a high probability of finding jobs that are not commensurate with their qualifications; (3) the effect of higher education policies appears to be heterogeneous across different countries. Therefore, we argue that policy makers should increase awareness about connecting internal measures of education system (e.g., course design) directly to aims and scopes of sustainable socio-economic development scenarios, and joint efforts shall be made to reduce such mismatch rates for particular subjects that are identified by regular monitoring procedures or programmes on the basis of full consideration of interests and reasonable requirements across different countries in Europe.