Could plenty of education be harmful? A history of economic theories of overeducation

The article presents an overview of the overeducation in the labor market. Before the effective birth of the economics of education, the debate was concerned over the proletarianization of the learned professions. The following period saw the elaboration of the fully-formed concept within the economics of education. We survey the reasons for the initial reluctance of the new discipline to deal with the problem and highlights the seminal works that gave the concept its canonical definition.