Abstract
Mass higher education can expand faster than the visible formal employment stock held by higher-educated workers. This study develops an Expansion Absorption Decoupling framework and examines this relationship using administrative data from Uzbekistan. National graduate flows are linked to higher-educated employment stocks, graduate output by field of study, sectoral employment, and a regional panel covering 14 regions. The Structural Absorption Capacity Ratio is a net stock-expansion diagnostic, not an individual graduate employment rate. Because the ratio has no natural target value, it is interpreted relative to the pre-expansion period. Graduate output increased from 67,448 in 2017 to 211,197 in 2024, while the stock of employees with higher education rose from 1.238 million to 1.791 million. The change in annual net stock increase was small (68.6, 83.1 and 82.5 thousand in 2022–2024) while graduate output roughly doubled, and SACR fell to 0.452 in 2023 and 0.391 in 2024, compared with the 2018–2022 benchmark of 0.703 that excludes the exceptional 2021 value. The 2024 decline is robust to alternative timing conventions and to hypothetical replacement rates of 2 to 5 percent, whereas the 2023 decline is not robust to a one-year-lagged graduate denominator. A log decomposition shows that the decline reflects the graduate surge rather than a contraction of net stock growth, which was approximately stable to moderately rising (4 to 46 percent above the benchmark, depending on the treatment of 2021); the 2024 result is therefore read as a robust descriptive divergence rather than as direct evidence of structural absorption pressure or insufficient labor demand. Exploratory two-year field diagnostics show higher values in Health, Education and ICT than in Engineering and Agriculture, which rank lowest in both years. Regional fixed effects yield a coefficient of 0.347 thousand employees with higher education per thousand graduates. Small-cluster inference clearly rejects a one-for-one relationship, whereas evidence of a positive association is only suggestive and not robust to excluding individual regions. The findings distinguish educational upgrading from net growth of formal higher-educated employment relative to graduate supply.