{"id":191,"date":"2026-09-16T06:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T05:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/?p=191"},"modified":"2026-09-16T06:51:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T05:51:20","slug":"overeducation-and-credential-inflation-in-the-czech-republic-measurement-analysis-and-implications-for-central-and-eastern-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/overeducation-and-credential-inflation-in-the-czech-republic-measurement-analysis-and-implications-for-central-and-eastern-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Overeducation and Credential Inflation in the Czech Republic: Measurement, Analysis, and Implications for Central and Eastern Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Michael L. Smith <\/strong>(Czech Academy of Sciences)<\/p>\n<p>Since the collapse of communism, educational systems in Central and Eastern Europe have undergone extensive expansion, especially at the tertiary level. This has led to concerns of overeducation &#8211; individuals having more education than their occupation requires &#8211; as well as concerns of credential inflation,\u00a0defined as the increase in educational credentials required<br \/>\nor found in occupations over time. Despite the widespread use of these concepts, sociologists rarely distinguish educational upgrading driven by structural labor-market change from upgrading occurring within occupations themselves &#8211; an issue of particular importance in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper reports trends in overeducation and develops an analytical framework for measuring credential inflation and decomposing it into within-occupation and structural components, thereby identifying \u201cnet\u201d credential inflation, i.e. within-occupation educational upgrading beyond what change in the occupational structure would predict. The analysis uses employer-based administrative data from the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (2011\u20132024), encompassing complete data of 6.9 million employees in medium and large enterprises across 126 ISCO 3-digit occupations. This is the same data source used for the Czech Labor Force Survey, which means that the same methodology can be applied to data from other Central and Eastern European countries in the EU.\u00a0In the presentation, I overview a simple but novel approach to measuring overeducation and operationalizing and indexing credential inflation for future research in the sociology of education. I show that credential inflation is not an overall characteristic of a labor market but is occupationally specific and highly stratified by gender. Female-dominated occupations exhibit disproportionately high<br \/>\nwithin-occupation upgrading relative to structural change; by contrast, men\u2019s upgrading is more strongly linked to occupational restructuring toward technical and professional work. These results reflect other observed changes in gender gaps in educational attainment and the gendered segregation of occupations in Central and Eastern Europe. While my presentation focuses on only one CEE country, the findings will be highly relevant to other education experts in CEE countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael L. Smith (Czech Academy of Sciences) Since the collapse of communism, educational systems in Central and Eastern Europe have undergone extensive expansion, especially at the tertiary level. This has led to concerns of overeducation &#8211; individuals having more education than their occupation requires &#8211; as well as concerns of credential inflation,\u00a0defined as the increase&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abstracts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konferencijos.lnb.lt\/education-after-totalitarianism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}