The previous chapters examined the idea of a design brief and creating preferred futures. Design thinking that is supportive of the Design and Technologies subject was explored, and through a series of case studies children from birth to 12 years were shown engaging in design thinking to generate and produce solutions to problems they were interested in solving.

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).