Introduction

Though graduates of UK universities have what is considered to be a life-long ‘graduate premium’ (Kemp-King, 2016) consisting of higher earnings and increased potential for upward social mobility than non-graduates, this does not protect all graduates from hardship. This chapter examines the diversity in trajectories of recent graduates in the UK through exploring the narratives of 15 working-class women who graduated from their undergraduate courses in 2013. The analysis draws on a dataset of 79 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2012 and 2017.

The chapter argues that while some working-class women graduates achieve upward social mobility as a result of attending higher education (HE), securing this upward trajectory requires far more than a university degree. Economic capital as well as ‘valuable’ cultural and social capital are required, and the most privileged are more likely to have access to these capitals, as well as the knowledge on how to mobilise them in order to find professional employment. This ‘game’, characterised by the intense hypermobilisation of capitals, takes place within a landscape that has become increasingly hostile and harmful to working-class people since the turn of the century. Austerity programmes have ravaged ‘left behind areas’ and welfare provision, leaving in their wake reduced employment prospects for some young people and an increase in the debts that they carry, as well as little in the way of a ‘safety net’. Further, the growth in insecure employment has made the lives of some working-class groups precarious. Graduates are not immune to these conditions, as the narratives presented in this chapter show.

This work demonstrates how young working-class women graduates operate within this landscape, strategise to cultivate distinctive curricula vitae (CVs) and become upwardly socially mobile. It explores too how they negotiate access to the welfare state, navigate the gig economy, precarious working conditions and economic hardship post-graduation. Before data are presented, literature on widening participation, graduate employment and the welfare state is examined. First, the policy and political context in which these women accessed university and the labour market is considered.

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.

Introduction

In this chapter, we turn to a consideration of graduate pathways for those who had no clear and definite employment plan during their time at university and at the point of exit. In doing so, we consider the ways in which early experiences of transition from university are inflected by social class, race and gender. The chapter presents the narratives of two middle-class, white, male politics graduates – Oscar and Liam – and two working-class history graduates – one white male (Garry) and one ‘mixedrace’ (white Welsh and African-Caribbean heritage) female (Adele). We consider the development of their career pathways on leaving university and highlight the significance of the role of time in facilitating/shutting down opportunity. We compare the unplanned ‘serendipity’ of the middle-class graduates with the unplanned ‘fateful outcomes’ of their working-class counterparts. The chapter highlights that what can superficially appear to be luck or serendipity is, in fact, a manifestation of privilege and relies on the availability of stocks of capital. Moreover, outcomes that appear to be ‘fateful’ are actually mediated by classed, racialized and gendered forms of capital. The chapter concludes with consideration of graduate spaces as important components in the navigation of unplanned pathways in the ways in which they invite privileged bodies, while rendering ‘other’ bodies as trespassers (Puwar, 2004).

Like many UK graduates across higher education, there were a number of young people in our study who graduated with minimal plans for the immediate future and no clear employment pathway. We found no pattern in terms of strategic planning and institution attended, gender, or class or ethnic background. We did, however, discern that certain subjects, such as law, economics, engineering, accounting and finance, were more likely to produce graduates with direct career goals. It is obvious that these subjects are taken with particular careers in mind, and this observation is not surprising. However, in the current context where some university subjects are under fire for their apparent lack of employment opportunities, it is important for us to highlight that a significant number of graduates taking subjects that do not have an obvious employment outcome go on to develop successful graduate careers.

Appendix

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.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the male-dominated field of engineering and explores intersections of class and gender in relation to new graduates’ experiences of trying to establish themselves in this section of the labour market. Specifically, we draw upon the work of Bourdieu and his concepts of habitus, symbolic violence and misrecognition, as well as developing an understanding of symbolically recognized capital in the engineering field, which we suggest could be seen as a form of ‘engineering capital’ (an extension of Bourdieu's different forms of capital), to help us examine how and why young women access, participate in but then leave the field of engineering, while young men are supported to succeed. We start the chapter by locating the experience of those who studied engineering in the context of other participants in the Paired Peers study, showing how the graduate outcomes of most of the Paired Peers participants followed gendered patterns.

Different gender, different career aspirations and outcomes

The majority of young women in our study opted for femaledominated professions, such as teaching, administration and charity work (see Table 5.1). This included a number of female graduates who started with aspirations in traditionally male-dominated professions like law but opted out and switched to teaching. They said that they did so for the perceived compatibility of their chosen employment with motherhood, following the patterns found in other research of women choosing careers that reduce the likelihood of discrimination and are more ‘family-friendly’ (Chevallier, 2007).

The patterns of graduate career progression that we found among the participants in Phase 2 of our research could be seen to reflect understandings of the process of developing a career identity, where the way in which ‘individuals consciously link their own interests, motivations and competencies with acceptable career roles’ is considered to begin in childhood and is further developed throughout an agent's life course (Praskova et al, 2015: 145). Young children have been found to ‘identify caring tasks with women, machines and technology with men’, and as they begin to consider future career selves, few people stray from these and other hegemonic gendered ideas of what is considered a ‘suitable’ career for the ‘likes of them’ (Bradley, 2015: 111).

Introduction

This chapter focuses on intersections of class and gender in the making of graduate careers in the finance sector. Finance is an industry perhaps best epitomizing hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995, 2000), where manhood is measured by financial success, and where both working and playing hard are de rigueur (Ingram and Waller, 2015). Working for a top City investment bank, in particular, is understood as a marker of aggressively achieved, hardwon financial success and masculine prowess. Graduate positions are fiercely competitive, one of the keenest examples of what Brown and colleagues have called ‘the global war for talent’ (Brown and Tannock, 2009; Brown et al, 2011).

Recruitment to elite graduate positions in such sectors as finance has increasingly focused on those from a small number of top-ranking universities (Wakeling and Savage, 2015), and the globalized nature of the neoliberal economic system has contributed to this trend (Brown et al, 2020), with ‘blue chip’ companies now recruiting from a global pool of talented graduates. This pattern of recruitment is a feature of the UK's financial services sector, particularly the City of London, following the ‘Big Bang’ financial deregulation in 1986 that allowed the electronic trading of stocks and shares, and that pushed London's financial status into a truly international world leader, rivalled only by New York.

The predominance of men in top jobs in the sector is documented in numerous reports (Metcalf and Rolfe, 2009; McDowell, 2011; Longlands, 2020; STEM Women, 2021). These highlight that despite the fact that women make up 43 per cent of the workforce in the financial services sector, they are significantly under-represented in leadership positions (STEM Women, 2021). This chapter focuses on what enables men to succeed and explores how male advantage in gaining access to high-status jobs in the sector is mediated by intersections with social class, benefiting those from middle-class backgrounds. The chapter focuses on three young male white graduates, all of whom pursued careers in finance. Nathan, who is white and from a securely middle-class background, completed a degree in law at the UoB. Harvey and Leo, both white and from a working-class background, studied economics (Harvey at the high-ranking UoB; Leo at UWE, a successful modern university).

Introduction

This chapter takes as its focus access to graduate employment opportunities in London and considers the role of the capital city in the reproduction of inequality. While graduate employment in professional and management positions is available across the UK, the Social Mobility Commission (2019) documents how London has seen a disproportionate growth in these positions in comparison to the rest of the UK, with 45 per cent of new jobs at this level being created in the capital. London is also widely recognized as a hub for elite graduate recruiters, particularly in respect to jobs in finance, law and IT.

The recruitment practices of these and other industries located in London have regularly been found to favour those who are already advantaged, effectively reproducing class inequalities. Cook et al (2012), for example, found that privately educated graduates were 13 times more likely to be employed in a London law firm than their state-educated peers. Through analysis of the recruitment and selection procedures of these firms, they conclude that these practices reproduce inequalities because they rely heavily on forms of symbolic capital to which the privileged have greater access. They discuss a specific ‘City effect’, where the culture of law firms conforms to the doxa of the field in recruiting the elite, something very much replicated in other elite industries in the city. Oakley et al (2017) draw similar conclusions in relation to the cultural and creative industries. Through analysis of the national Labour Force Survey, they highlight how the privileged dominate the sector, especially in London, with over 60 per cent of those employed in the cultural and creative industries in London coming from professional/managerial backgrounds, while the figure for the rest of the UK is roughly 45 per cent.

This pattern of recruitment practices then extends into a distinctive class pay gap within managerial and professional positions. Findings from the Social Mobility Commission's (2019) ‘State of the nation’ report document that those in professional or managerial occupations from working-class backgrounds earn 17 per cent per year less than their colleagues from more privileged backgrounds, and Friedman, Laurison and Macmillan (2017) note an average pay gap of £10,660 per year for those from working-class backgrounds compared to those from professional or managerial backgrounds.

Introduction

This was how Jasmine, a white, working-class sociology graduate from UWE, described her idyllic dreams of what her life after university would be like. This upbeat dream of the future is typical of many of the participants in the Paired Peers study. As young people make their early steps into working lives, going to university is seen to offer a passport to worldly success and a secure future in a decently rewarded job, and is reflected in their optimism. Indeed, as we have discussed in Chapter 1, university participation is constructed in policy and political discourse as the ticket to the good life and a route to social mobility (Ingram and Gamsu, 2022). The pervasive discourse of social mobility within the higher education policy domain has promoted and maintained a belief in the employment rewards of higher education, which, in turn, has encouraged working-class young people's participation. This prospect is particularly alluring to those, like Jasmine, who are the first in their family to enter higher education, who understandably bank on education as the route to a more prosperous future. For many middle-class young people, who see going to university as the taken-for-granted thing to do (see Bathmaker et al, 2016), the prospect may not evoke in them the same kind of optimistic visions of class mobility; rather, it brings tacit expectations of consolidating their class position and contributing to continuing class reproduction. Yet, most students entering higher education will have their own aspirations and their own visions of success, which, as the chapters in this book show, are more diverse than narrow measures based on employment destination and earnings. In this chapter, we consider the motivations and dreams of participants in the Paired Peers study, and look at how what actually awaits lives up to these dreams through the eyes of two graduates: Jasmine and Martin.

Introduction

This book is the outcome of a longitudinal qualitative study, the Paired Peers project, which followed the progress of a cohort of young people throughout their undergraduate study and beyond into the labour market and future lives. A key goal of the research was to compare the experiences of young people from workingclass and middle-class backgrounds.

While there have been major quantitative studies of graduate origins and destinations (Brown, 2006; Brown and Tannock, 2009; Purcell et al, 2009, 2013; Brown et al, 2010; Elias et al, 2021), there has been less qualitative work on graduate careers, especially of a longitudinal nature. Burke's (2016) and Tholen's (2017) studies are notable exceptions, along with Lehman's (2019, 2021) work in Canada. Very little is known about the complexity of graduate labour market transitions at the end of the 2010s, beyond the data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) through the former DLHE and the current Graduate Outcomes surveys, which have captured graduate destinations at six and 15 months respectively. Our study affords an opportunity to analyse processes, opportunities and strategies – and to allow individuals to reflect on what they are doing – in a way that no other data can (Corden and Millar, 2007). The existence of a well-motivated cohort of participants provided a unique opportunity to study in real depth the lives and values of a new generation of graduates, as well as their transitions to adult lives in a post-recessionary context, at a time of national and global change in the nature of jobs and occupations.

Participants in the research all studied at either UWE or the UoB in Bristol. Bristol is the largest city in the south-west of England. Located just over 100 miles west of London, Bristol's economy in the 21st century is built on the creative media, technology, electronics and aerospace industries. Like many UK cities, Bristol has two universities: UWE, a modern university and a former polytechnic, with a focus on both teaching and research; and the UoB, a traditional ‘redbrick’ university (that is, one of those founded in the 19th or early 20th centuries in major British cities), which is a member of the ‘elite’ Russell group of universities in the UK. Participants in the research presented in this book studied at one or other of these two universities.

Introduction

This book is about the workings of social class, race (specifically whiteness) and gender in young graduates’ lives. Its aim is to provide insights into the ways in which the dominant policy goals of social mobility and graduate employability are experienced by young people themselves. The book is based on a longitudinal study of young people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds (the Paired Peers project), who attended one of two universities in Bristol, UK, during the 2010s: the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE), a modern ‘post-92’ university; and the University of Bristol (UoB), a member of the high-status Russell Group of universities. The book traces the unfolding of their young graduate lives through an analysis of a unique longitudinal qualitative data set gathered over a seven-year period.

This is the second of two books from the project team. The first book (Bathmaker et al, 2016) presents the findings of the first phase of the project and considers students’ experiences of getting in, getting on and getting out of university. It demonstrates the significance of social class, as well as gender and race, for students’ experience of higher education and contributes a critical and complex understanding of social reproduction and social mobility through higher education. In this follow-on book, we use data from both Phase 2 and Phase 1 of the project, and turn the spotlight onto the transition beyond university through to four years post-graduation. Most data about graduates in the UK are collected through the national graduate outcomes survey, a limited quantitative survey that captures a snapshot of graduate destinations just 15 months after leaving university. Our book provides an original qualitative longitudinal perspective on the process of early career development, which is not captured by the graduate outcomes survey or by other studies.

The Paired Peers project (2010– 17) followed a cohort of 90 young people from middle-class and working-class backgrounds who started undergraduate study in England in 2010 and who graduated in 2013/14. The study followed these young people throughout their undergraduate lives and for four years post-graduation.