Review: N. Ingram, A. Bathmaker, J. Abrahams, L. Bentley, H. Bradley, T. Hoare, V. Papafilippou and R. Waller, ‘The Degree Generation: The Making of Unequal Graduate Lives’
Review: Nicola Ingram, Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Jessie Abrahams, Laura Bentley, Harriet Bradley, Tony Hoare, Vanda Papafilippou and Richard Waller, The Degree Generation: The Making of Unequal Graduate Lives (Bristol University Press, 2023) 212 pages
Abstract
“The Degree Generation” is based on the Paired Peers project which was a longitudinal qualitative study of young people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds who attended one of two universities in Bristol. This book focused on the graduates’ job-search and lives after graduation and strove to unveil how cultural capital in various forms were at work in how graduates perceive opportunities, seek jobs and forge career pathways. The book examined how “social magic” worked to transform capital into job opportunities and eventually better lives and high-flying careers —purportedly promised by a college degree— for some graduates while at the same time, dashes other graduates’ hopes for the same in what the study termed as “cruel optimism”. In this review, I draw connections between the book’s claims and my observations from teaching a course about universities to undergraduates. Many of my observations about undergraduates’ perspectives on graduate employability and the value of a university education concur with the book’s claims. In a further step, I raise questions about whether there could be alternatives to make sense of such entrenched disparities and if alternative conceptions of ‘capital’ can lead to new ways of reimagining higher education institutions.
Reviewed by Sixian Hah
Gaining employment almost immediately or shortly after graduation has long been held as a hallmark of success for undergraduates. But little is known about graduates who may have accepted a job offer that is not aligned with their degree or their initial expectations of a job. The Degree Generation (Ingram et al., 2023) brought to light such conundrums and aimed to demonstrate how deeply entrenched social and cultural capital works in reinforcing disparities in work opportunities and careers among graduates despite mainstream beliefs of higher education as a social leveller. The book raised persistent questions about how gaining a higher education qualification will guarantee employment or even, higher-paid employment. Set in the context of rising student debt, such questions provoke thought about deeper issues about the higher education as social leveller, the value of an undergraduate education and more.
The Paired Peers project was unique in that it collected data over nearly 12 years, where the team followed this group of young people “throughout their undergraduate study and beyond into the labour market and future lives” (Ingram et al., 2023: 30). This book is squarely couched in the sociology of education and more specifically, Bourdieu’s theory of ‘symbolic capital’ where symbolic capital is a way to legitimize the power and privileges of the dominant social class (Sapiro, 2015). Stemming from these Bourdieusian notions, it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of graduate identities and how cultural capital and middle-class privileges can get transformed through “social magic” to legitimatise opportunities and rewards for some graduates more than others. What makes this contribution even more valuable is the fact that social and cultural forms of capitals are often “difficult to quantify and operationalize” (Ingram et al., 2023: 32).
The Paired Peers project reaped a range of intriguing observations about how capital operates. It introduced newer manifestations of capitals such as the “London habitus” (Ingram et al., 2023: 46) which was defined as a culmination of economic and cultural capital with geographical capital, enabling possessors of such capital to be highly mobile and to be able to access opportunities widely and even globally, which in turn makes such graduates very attractive to employers. The ability to stay close to or live in London was seen as capital that provided possessors to gain employment opportunities or their desired career progression, particularly seen in the cases of Nathan, Harvey and Leo in the finance world (Ch. 6).
The accounts from Nathan (Ch. 6) resonated strongly with narratives I hear from undergraduates in Singapore. “Hustling” for internships and not just any internship, but those with prestigious companies or famous start-ups in order to get a foothold in the job market, undergraduates face a plethora of pressures to rack up a list of accomplishments on their CVs even before securing a job. Reaching back a little further, one can imagine that these accomplishments and internship opportunities will require some levels of capital or “navigational capacity” (Appadurai, 2004, as cited in O’Shea, p. 71) especially among undergraduates who are less advantaged to obtain the knowledge, confidence and social networks of negotiating the challenges of obtaining an internship.
Another new manifestation of capital, the engineering capital, occurred at the intersections with gender. In the case of the engineering field, Marcus was clearly a ‘better fit’ at the workplace while Jennifer struggled with the departure of her woman mentor and the lack of opportunities for her to take on the mantle of more important roles (Ch. 5).
The authors also strove to show that “luck” was white middle-class privileges at work. In other words, gaining employment-related opportunities seemed more obscure if one were not white or possess strong familial financial backing. In Oscar’s case, his “luck” was related with how he was able to take the ‘risk’ of moving into his sister’s house in London and live on his savings while looking for a job (Ch. 8). In contrast, his working-class counterparts could not afford to take time out to explore their desired career pathways and would have to take the “right now” job instead (Adele, Garry in Ch. 8).
The book also tried to show how capital operates at the intersections of class, gender and ethnicity though this seemed slightly less apparent through the illustration of Adele (working-class, of white Welsh and African- Caribbean heritage).
Between 2021 and 2022, I designed and taught a course exploring questions about higher education for undergraduate students at my college. What struck me was semester after semester, students echoed the same expectations and belief that their undergraduate degree should lead to a high-paying job, a fulfilling career and better quality of life. The graduate in Singapore is often constructed as a white-collar employee and earning higher pay as seen in annual state-run surveys and comparisons drawn between salaries of university graduates and graduates from polytechnics. It was not uncommon for students to be candid about the impetus for choosing a certain major or course programme to be how it purportedly will lead to more lucrative careers, as indicated in annual reports mapping the starting salaries of undergraduates in various industries. Invariably, there was a higher tendency among students to express desires for their undergraduate courses to be more tailored to preparing them for their future job. In the same breath, students tend to eschew courses which they perceive to be less connected with what they imagine as job-relevant and applicable, or express unhappiness when those courses were made mandatory. Almost tangentially connected is the observation that students increasingly saw themselves as consumers of higher education with higher expectations of “returns” in their investment in a college degree to be in the form of a lucrative career.
Boden & Nedeva (2010) argued that employability discourses “support the commodification of higher education” as it is now perceived as a “product to be consumed to achieve future personal economic benefit” (47). Their argument was based on their observations of the UK higher education industry and they strove to show how the state had “[appropriated] the power to define notions of employability”, in turn creating expectations among employers for job-ready graduates and reducing the agency of most universities over their curricula and type of education and more importantly, “re-casting” the student “as a customer and of education as an investment that will bring long-term and generous financial returns” (2010: 47). Hence, it can be particularly crushing when graduates realised that they could not attain the job or quality of life which they thought would accompany a university degree, as evident from the “cruel optimism” in the case of Jasmine (Ch. 7). The book challenges often-held beliefs that a graduate degree brings with it better employment outcomes and remuneration, and demonstrates with qualitative data the existence of a “social fiction that a degree leads to a fulfilling career” which “disguises the failure of many graduates to lead fulfilling careers, high wages and skilled jobs” (Ingram et al., 2023: 181).
One wonders then, if a university education should be valued for the arduous but quintessential task of enabling graduates to imagine better possibilities for themselves and in doing so, create opportunities and forge new paths for themselves. Sarah O’Shea (2016) argued that undergraduates often enter university with a range of capitals which are different from the ones valued by the institution. She delved into Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth framework to make an argument about how first-in-family students, often seen as disadvantaged, could draw upon existing capitals such as “aspirational capital” and “resistant capital” among others to forge a path for themselves in an institutional environment whom they may not be perceived as fitting in with. In fact, “aspirational capital” was defined as a form of resilience which allows both the individual and their children to ‘dream of possibilities beyond their present circumstances, often without the objective means to attain those goals’ (Yosso, 2005 as cited in O’Shea, 2016: 71). Yosso’s framework provides an alternative view of capitals that students can have in navigating through the traditionally established and dominant Bourdieusian notions of social capital and habitus expected in an elite institution. Could a university education be a conduit to empower graduates to re-imagine possibilities for their future and to transform their lives? One would like to think so, though the Degree Generation argues that this transformation is limited by these deep-running disparities in graduates’ pre-existing capitals and the status quo upheld in higher education and the society.
While the book advocated for more radical governmental policies or employability support that consider “structural conditions” (11) beyond the control of the graduate or the university, it did not make recommendations for the kinds of policies that can address deeply entrenched disparities between disadvantaged and advantaged graduates. I suppose such “structural conditions” referred to long-standing disparities in remuneration, prospects and societal perceptions of graduate and non-graduate employment, or white-collar and blue-collar professions. The book did not seem to propose how such disparities could be re-imagined. During the pandemic, the world realised for a moment how “essential” certain blue-collar jobs (supermarket stockers, farmers, food producers, healthcare personnel, cleaning services…etc) were as compared to some high-paying white-collar professions. But this did not lead to market-driven ‘corrections’ in remuneration for such jobs.
In an ideal world where disparities between graduate and non-graduate employment are markedly reduced or eradicated, one wonders if young people’s desires to pursue self-development through higher education will persist should there be no economic incentives that come with a college qualification in today’s mostly market-driven societies? It is perhaps hard to imagine how such an ideal world will be like since most economies today are built on some form of capitalism. Another question that arises is: Given alternative conceptions of ‘capital’ and arguments that first-generation disadvantaged undergraduates could make use of these alternative capitals to their benefit (Cf. O’Shea, Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth framework), could the Bourdieusian conception of “social magic” be seen as overly deterministic?
One wonders too if disciplines play a part in how capital translates to advantage or disadvantage. The book did not delve into the comparison of graduates from STEM disciplines with social science disciplines. Are the odds invariably stacked against humanities graduates as compared to engineering or computer science graduates as job market and societal trends evolve? Computer science faculties have welcomed a boost in enrolment figures as the “Big Tech” industry rises. Would this imply that in such industries, capital may play a smaller role in how quickly or successfully graduates obtained employment?
Nonetheless, this book presents a formidable illustration of how sociocultural capital remains entrenched in our society as long as employers continue to “employ in their own image and value” (181) and the privileged continues to maintain their own privilege by legitimatising certain capitals (182). How can these heavy cogs in the gears of social order be changed? First, one needs to be aware and attuned to such invisible valuation practices and “The Degree Generation” contributes a big step towards attuning readers to the click of these cogs.
References
Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) 'Employing discourse: universities and graduate ‘employability’', Journal of Education Policy, 25(1): 37-54.
Ingram, N., Bathmaker, A.-M., Abrahams, J., Bentley, L., Bradley, H., Hoare, T., Papafilippou, V. and Waller, R. (2023) The degree generation: The making of unequal graduate lives. Policy Press.
O’Shea, S. (2016) 'Avoiding the manufacture of ‘sameness’: First-in-family students, cultural capital and the higher education environment', Higher Education, 72: 59-78.
Sapiro, G. (2015) 'Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)', in Wright, J.D. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition). Oxford: Elsevier, 777-783.
Sixian Hah is a Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication (CELC), National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Warwick, UK where she did research on academic researchers and the higher education landscape in Britain. Coming from a background in applied linguistics and education, her research interests lie in discourse analysis, pragmatics, identity construction and interactional linguistics. She had previously designed and taught a course “The University Today” for undergraduates where they discussed issues such as the value of a university education, college admissions, graduate employment, technology use and various aspects of higher education.
Email: sxhah@nus.edu.sg
