Introduction

This chapter focuses on the significance of ‘home’ for graduate mobility and the ways in which home contributes to capacities to navigate graduate futures. For young people who participate in higher education in England, the dominant narrative is one of leaving behind the family home and becoming geographically mobile. The ‘student experience’ is structured around a normative assumption of moving away to live in student accommodation and become immersed in university life (Patiniotis and Holdsworth, 2005; Christie, 2007; Holdsworth, 2009), despite the considerable number of students who do not leave the parental or guardian home to attend university (HESA, 2021). On completion of higher education study, there has been a similar normative expectation that graduates should be self-reliant and readily move away from their home place to locations where high-skilled work is situated (Christie and Burke, 2021). Yet, recent research indicates that it is those from privileged class backgrounds who move long distances for graduate employment (Hecht et al, 2020). Moreover, return migration to the parental home has recently become an accepted coping strategy for graduates from all social class backgrounds in a context of much less certain graduate futures (Sage et al, 2013; Stone et al, 2014).

The chapter examines how these dominant narratives of spatial mobility play out in the lives and experience of participants in the Paired Peers project. The project followed students studying at the two universities in Bristol from the start of their undergraduate degrees through to four years after graduation (2010– 17) (for further details on methods, see Chapter 2). The two graduates at the heart of the chapter both studied English: Ruby, from a working-class background, who studied at the mediumtariff modern UWE; and Elliot, from a middle-class family background, who attended the high-ranking and prestigious UoB. English is a ‘traditional’ university discipline in England, which is particularly popular with young women. There is a perception that those who choose it tend to do so because of their love of literature, rather than for career reasons, though many may have aspirations towards working in the media or becoming a writer, while others aspire to teaching. Ruby and Elliot reflect these contrasting career aspirations and subsequent occupational pathways.