From the US Chamber of Commerce to the halls of academia, the warnings have been abundant: A shortage of skilled workers with college degrees will create a workforce crisis by the year 2018.

The projected shortage is rooted in demographics — retiring baby boomers and slowing population growth — and will leave employers short-staffed and the United States at a competitive disadvantage.

But a recent paper by Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, and Paul Harrington, who recently left Northeastern for Drexel University in Philadelphia, calls those predictions overblown.

The researchers said studies forecasting labor shortages ignore a large and growing number of college graduates who work in low-skill, low-paying occupations. These are the legions of overeducated waiters and waitresses, retail clerks, and receptionists who hold college degrees, a problem known as “malemployment.’’

If this hidden college-educated workforce is considered, then looming shortages in occupations requiring college degrees appear less dire, Sum and Harrington argue.

Sum said about 25 percent of all employed, college-educated adults in the nation work in jobs that don’t require a college degree. That number increases to nearly 40 percent for recent college graduates, many of whom are struggling to repay loans.

“We have to be honest about this problem, otherwise we’re setting people up for failure,’’ Sum said. “We would like colleges and universities and employers to work together to find a way to reduce the problem.’’

Harrington and Sum’s analysis of Labor Department data found nearly 16 percent of young college graduates (age 25 and under) were working in retail jobs from January to October of last year. Nearly 10 percent worked as waiters, waitresses, and bartenders, and 6 percent took jobs as secretaries or office assistants.

Harrington and Sum’s paper, published by the New England Board of Higher Education, criticized a widely publicized study last year by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. That study predicted the nation will need 22 million college graduates to meet employer demand by 2018, but at current graduation rates, colleges and universities will produce only 19 million.

The study’s author, professor Anthony P. Carnevale, said evidence of the demand for college graduates is apparent from the steady rise in wages for degree holders. The $3 million study, paid for by Georgetown and charitable foundations, found overall wages for college graduates were 74 percent higher than those of high school graduates in 2008. The wage advantage was just 30 percent in 1979.

This wage analysis, Carnevale said, captures college grads working in occupations that don’t require degrees and supports his forecast of a looming shortage.