The Occupation Is Bigger Than Its Entry Label
For a worker with a bachelor’s degree, an occupation is not an educationally uniform container. This chapter examines what happens when many graduates work in an occupation that the BLS assigns a lower entry requirement, and how the observed education of workers changes the underemployment question. The practical judgment is careful rather than automatic: a large graduate share is evidence that the entry label is incomplete, but it is not by itself proof that every job in the occupation uses college-level skills.
One occupation can hold several kinds of work
An entry-level assignment describes the education most workers typically need to get started. It does not describe every position that can exist after hiring. A broad occupational group may include a new worker learning routine tasks, a senior worker handling unusual cases, a specialist using advanced knowledge, and a supervisor coordinating other people’s work. Those roles can share a code even when their responsibilities, autonomy, and earning potential differ.
The difference becomes visible in the education distribution of the people actually employed. The Georgetown report finds that 27 percent of occupations classified as “high school level” employ more workers with a bachelor’s degree than workers with a high school diploma. It also finds that just over one in five workers in occupations categorized as requiring a high school diploma or less for entry hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.
These figures do not say that all of those graduates are well matched. Some may have taken jobs below their capabilities, particularly in a weak labor market. Others may have chosen the work for its schedule, location, autonomy, stability, or opportunities to move into more demanding responsibilities. Still others may occupy roles for which employers prefer a graduate even though a bachelor’s degree is not the typical minimum for entering the occupation. The key point is narrower: the BLS entry label cannot plausibly be read as if it describes a single level of work performed by every person in the group.
The report’s examples make the pattern harder to dismiss as a statistical curiosity. Among the high-school-level occupations with the largest share of workers holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, that share is 70 percent for advertising sales agents and exercise or group-fitness trainers, 63 percent for detectives and criminal investigators, 61 percent for photographers, and 58 percent for media and communication workers. These are not claims that all work in those occupations is degree-level. They show that an entry category below bachelor’s can coexist with a workforce in which graduates are a majority or a large plurality.
Why might this happen? One possibility is that the occupation contains different levels of responsibility. Advertising sales, for example, can involve more than following a standard script; client strategy, persuasion, market analysis, and account responsibility may be distributed unevenly across jobs. A second possibility is that employer preferences have changed faster than a national entry assignment. A third is that requirements differ across regions and industries. A fourth is credential inflation: employers may ask for degrees because degrees have become common, even when the underlying tasks have not become more demanding.
These explanations can point in opposite directions. If graduates are concentrated in senior positions or in employers serving more complex clients, their presence may indicate that the occupation contains a degree-level track that the entry category conceals. If graduates are spread across routine positions because a degree has become a general screening device, their presence may say more about hiring norms than about the work itself. If a recession pushes graduates into available jobs, the same distribution may be temporary. The national share cannot distinguish these cases without information about tasks, seniority, employer practices, and movement through the labor market.
The distinction matters because “more graduates than high-school workers” is a statement about composition, not a statement about capability. It tells us that the occupation’s workforce does not resemble the simple hierarchy implied by its entry label. It does not tell us whether the graduate group is using advanced knowledge, receiving a premium for it, or merely carrying a credential into work that would otherwise be unchanged. The finding should widen the question, not close it.
The data cannot choose among these explanations for every worker. They establish educational diversity inside the occupation. Understanding what that diversity means requires another measurement lens.
Reading the realized match
A realized-matches approach starts with the education of workers who are already employed in an occupation. Instead of assuming that the BLS entry assignment is the occupation’s only meaningful education boundary, it asks how the workforce is distributed across three broad groups: high school diploma or less, some college or an associate’s degree, and bachelor’s degree or higher.
The method then needs a rule for deciding when the graduate group makes an occupation “bachelor’s degree level.” The Georgetown report examines two rules. Under majority realized matches, an occupation reaches the bachelor’s level only when more than 50 percent of its workers hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Under plurality realized matches, the occupation reaches that level when graduates are the largest education group, even if they are less than half of all workers.
The distinction is easiest to see with a hypothetical distribution. Suppose an occupation has 45 percent workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher, 35 percent with a high school diploma or less, and 20 percent with some college or an associate’s degree. Graduates are the largest group, so the occupation qualifies under a plurality rule. They are not a majority, so it does not qualify under a majority rule. The workers and their education have not changed; only the meaning of “typical” has changed.
The plurality rule responds to a supply constraint. The report notes that workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher make up approximately 36 percent of the workforce. If an occupation could count as degree-level only when graduates formed a majority, many occupations might fail that test even when employers consistently sought more graduates than any other education group. A plurality rule recognizes that the largest group may be the most realistic marker when the labor market cannot supply graduates for most positions.
That is an interpretive choice, not a mathematical correction. A majority threshold asks whether graduates dominate the occupation. A plurality threshold asks whether they are the largest single group. The first sets a stronger standard for calling work degree-level; the second is more sensitive to a graduate group that leads without crossing half of the workforce. Neither threshold follows automatically from the data.
The realized-matches lens has a genuine advantage over a fixed entry label: it reflects what the labor market has actually produced. It can capture employer preferences, changes in occupational practice, and skills upgrading as they appear in the workforce. It can also be updated with new employment data more readily than assignments that depend on periodic expert review.
But observed hiring is not a transparent window into skill requirements. A high graduate share can arise because employers need advanced capabilities. It can also arise because a degree has become a screening credential, because graduates are temporarily accepting jobs below their education, or because there are too few workers with the relevant credentials to make a majority possible. The same distribution can therefore support more than one interpretation.
What changes when the rule changes
For prime-age, full-time, full-year workers with bachelor’s degrees, the report estimates 37 percent underemployment using the BLS-based approach. The majority realized-matches version lowers the estimate to 32 percent. The plurality version lowers it further to 24 percent. The movement is substantial, but it should not be described as three successive discoveries of the “true” rate.
Each figure answers a different question. The BLS-based estimate asks whether a graduate works in an occupation whose typical entry assignment is below a bachelor’s degree. The majority version asks whether the graduate works in an occupation where graduates make up more than half of the workforce. The plurality version asks whether graduates are the largest education group. The numerator changes because the boundary around a degree-level occupation changes.
This comparison also illustrates why a lower rate is not automatically a better rate. If the concern is whether graduates are placed in occupations that officially require less education at entry, the BLS-based measure is directly aligned with that concern. If the concern is whether the occupation’s actual workforce has become predominantly graduate-level, realized matches are more relevant. If the concern is whether graduates’ skills are being rewarded in the work, neither education threshold fully answers it.
The occupation-level data hide individual variation in both directions. A graduate can be in a plurality-degree occupation while doing routine work that does not use their education. A graduate can be in a majority high-school-level occupation while holding a specialized position and receiving a meaningful return for their capabilities. A classification can therefore be useful for identifying patterns without being sufficient to evaluate a person’s match.
The trade-off behind “realized”
Calling the method realized matches emphasizes that it measures outcomes of hiring rather than only a prior judgment about entry requirements. That makes it responsive, but responsiveness brings ambiguity. Employers may hire graduates because the work has changed. They may hire them because a degree is an efficient signal when skills are hard to observe. They may hire them because the supply of graduates has grown, allowing them to raise credentials without changing tasks. Or graduates may accept the available job during a difficult transition.
Those possibilities matter for people making career decisions. A graduate share can be a useful signal that an occupation contains routes where a degree is valued. It does not guarantee that a particular employer will offer learning, autonomy, advancement, or compensation commensurate with the worker’s education. The same occupational category can contain a promising entry role and a dead-end role, and the aggregate distribution cannot tell us which one a person has found.
The report also warns that occupations are not perfectly observed units. Detailed occupations do not capture every job title. The broader the grouping, the more likely it is that distinct tasks and seniority levels are combined. Sector and regional differences can disappear inside a national distribution. A measure that is closer to observed hiring at the national level may still be distant from the job description on a particular contract.
This is why the evidence should be read as a complement to the BLS baseline. The BLS assignment supplies a consistent reference for the usual path into an occupation. The realized distribution tests whether that path resembles the education of workers who are actually there. Disagreement between them is informative: it tells us that the occupation’s entry label and its workforce composition are not describing the same thing. It does not tell us, without further evidence, whether the gap reflects productive upgrading, credential inflation, individual choice, or underemployment.
The most defensible conclusion is therefore conditional. When graduates are numerous inside a below-bachelor occupation, the occupation deserves closer examination rather than automatic labeling. The next questions concern the roles graduates hold, the responsibilities they perform, and the economic return they receive. Workforce composition reveals that the entry label is incomplete; it does not finish the inquiry.