The education requirements for public employees is vastly inflated. Higher education requirement are a screening crutch for bureaucratic hiring practices that often result in hiring people not suited to the work. Higher education requirements are also used to justify higher salaries, often far in excess of what the private sector pays for similar work.
I believe that much of the growth in diploma mills and commercial college level providers (e.g. Univ of Phoenix) is driven by the public sector where a Masters degree from Fred and Sally’s Handy Dandy Grad School counts the same as a Masters from Harvard. With the first you get an idiot with a degree. With the second you get a genius with a degree and no clue. Take your pick.
Is the conclusion then that the basis for the comparison - educational levels - is inflated on the public employee side? Not sure I posed that question exactly clearly.
“Higher education requirements are also used to justify higher salaries, often far in excess of what the private sector pays for similar work.”
This makes sense. I was trying to reconcile the results of this study with another study posted elsewhere on FR where they made side-by-side comparisons of compensation for different job categories (e.g., secretaries, computer programmers). In all those comparisons the public sector workers earned more, often by double-digit percentages. This latter approach seems like a far more appropriate method of determining who is overpaid.
Another way of viewing this study’s results is to say that public workers are underemployed. That is, a typical public employee with a Masters is working at a job that a typical person with a Bachelor’s degree could handle. Hence, when you compare average compensation of public employees with Masters to their counterparts in the private sector (without taking into account the actual jobs they hold), they understandably are paid less. But that doesn’t negate the fact that for whatever job they are doing in the public sector, they likely are getting paid MORE than they would have in the private sector.
I guess you’d have to be a public sector worker to regard this situation as unfair to one’s self instead of counting your blessings. This would explain why a higher percentage of public sector workers are in unions compared to those in the private sector. Unions fuel and feed upon making workers feel like victims.