Determinants of Job Satisfaction among Doctorate Holders: Focusing on the Relationship between Over-Education and Job Satisfaction in South Korea

This study aims to analyze the determinants of job satisfaction among doctorate holders in South Korea, with a particular focus on the relationship between over-education and job satisfaction. Unlike most previous studies, this paper considers overall job satisfaction as well as six different domains of job satisfaction (promotion opportunities, intellectual challenge, level of responsibility, level of autonomy, contribution to society, and social status) using data from the Korean Survey on Careers and Mobility of Doctorate Holders of 2017. This multi-dimensional approach to job satisfaction is important since the nature of job satisfaction is a complex concept in general. The main result of an ordered probit model reveals that perceived over-education is found to be a significant negative determinant of overall job satisfaction as well as all six aspects of job satisfaction, suggesting that over-educated doctorate holders are more dissatisfied with various aspects of their job compared to their well-matched counterparts.