Abstract

By law, the degree courses must design the curricula taking into account the professional demand and list the professional profiles. This study uses the information on the professional profiles to analyze the educational match of university graduates. We construct an innovative job-analysis measure of educational mismatch to answer the following research question: how many graduates practice a profession included in the list of professional profiles provided by the degree courses? The main advantage of our measure is that it allows to analyze the educational match on both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Consistent with the literature, we find that ascriptive attributes and institutional factors predict the educational mismatch. Accordingly, we argue that, although the information on professional profiles can be used to study the career paths of graduates in the light of the educational match, it is inadequate to use this information to evaluate the quality of the university courses.