Introduction

Throughout this book, we have considered how young graduates construct their transitions to future lives and work, and, at the same time, how they are constructed through those transitions. The making of graduate lives is about profoundly more than finding work. We have shown that there are many ways to be a graduate, and in doing so, we have considered the value that young people place on the work they do and the work to which they aspire. For some, success entailed finding work that required a degree qualification (for example, as a fund-raising officer or project manager in Chapter 8). For others, being a successful graduate entailed finding work that utilized skills and knowledge from their university degree (such as biological knowledge in Chapter 3 and engineering skills in Chapter 5). For yet others, the emphasis was on finding work that they found valuable or meaningful (care work and international development work in Chapter 7; teaching in Chapter 4). The rewards of work in terms of both remuneration and personal satisfaction varied, and there was sometimes a trade-off between the two. The work that graduates constructed as worthy and meaningful was not necessarily well paid, while particularly well-paid work was not often constructed in terms of social value; in one case, the lucrative career of banking was described as ‘selling youth’.

While the chapters in the book are based on the narratives of individual participants in the project, this is not merely a set of stories about graduate labour market transitions. Rather, the stories are located within their histories, which consider the connection between structural, institutional and subjective factors in understanding social action and the workings of inequality (Bathmaker, 2010; Burke, 2016; Tarabini and Ingram, 2018). Looking deeply at experiences at the individual level has provided important insight into the reproduction of structural inequalities and how they manifest through the habitus, embodied cultural capital and symbolic classifications that differentiate graduates’ value on the labour market.

Labour market futures were not the only consideration for participants in our study; they also talked about how they understood their futures as more than getting a job and achieving a successful career.