The Degree Generation: The Making of Unequal Graduate Lives

The Degree Generation illustrates a remarkable and inspiring research effort that carefully and diligently unpacks the complexity of graduate lives. In so doing, this book shows the ways in which such lives are inherently unequal; it also demonstrates how these inequalities travel beyond higher educational institutions and into the world of work, thus signifying the complex relationship between education and society. It draws on longitudinal data, generated through interactions with ninety students, over seven years, to capture inequality in its multifaceted, multi-layered form. This methodological approach has allowed the authors to bring to light the everyday reality of intersectionality and positioning of UK graduates by class, gender and race. Thus, this book contributes empirically and conceptually to the field of sociology of education.

The content in the book is organised across nine chapters and each of these chapters offers something unique to the scholarly discourse on and about graduate lives. Chapter one outlines the distinctive focus of the book on the aspects of graduate success and graduate lives. Chapter 2 discusses the project’s purpose, its design and the profile of the research participants whose transitional experiences are at the heart of this book. Chapters three and four bring into sharp focus the importance of place in the construction of graduate mobilities and the role of the mobilisation of capital in shaping those mobility experiences. Chapters five and six show the ways in which graduate lives are mediated by social characteristics of class and gender within the context of employment. Chapters seven and eight provide insightful evidence to critique the narrow, restrictive and overall limiting notions of graduate pathways and outcomes – time offers a vital lens for analysis in these chapters. The final chapter brings together various concepts the authors have introduced and discussed in previous chapters and teases out the conceptual offerings of this empirically ground-breaking work.

Each of these chapters speaks to scholarly and policy discourses in higher education and produces new knowledge in the social construction of the degree generation within the UK context. At the same time, these chapters maintain the focus on the complexity of graduate lives and identify useful conceptual tools that help with comprehending this complexity more fully. Notable for me was the authors’ insistence on expanding the ways in which students are socially constructed to capture the essence of being a graduate. Specifically, they note and provide comprehensive evidence to support their argument that the nature and extent of graduate outcomes are broader than the notion of employment ‘success’, which is often the focus of policy documents. This argument and supporting evidence align with the experiences of higher education students in other countries in Europe (see Brooks et al., 2021, 2022). Moreover, it further advances the ongoing discourse on constructing students as consumers, which in many instances is resisted by the students themselves as it tends to reduce the nature of their engagement with education as merely transactional during their time in higher educational institutions (see Gupta et al., 2023) and after they graduate (Souto-Otero et al., 2023).

I particularly enjoyed reading the methodological approach to pursuing this novel research project. Not only do the authors explain what their data constituted but they also delve deeper into various aspects, particularly social class for instance, which in significant ways were central to the analysis of the research findings. The authors provide an insightful and thought-provoking discussion of social class in the empirical context before outlining the specific aspects they considered for capturing the social class positioning of the people they spoke with. This exercise was instrumental in contextualising the research data and findings, especially in terms of the classed nature of graduate lives. This reflective discussion also speaks to the larger discourse in the field of sociology of education about the heterogeneity of social class and its impact on understanding the processes and everyday practice of educational advantages across countries (see Gupta, 2020, 2023 for discussion).

I also appreciated the authors’ reflection on what they see as a ‘missed opportunity’ for analysing the role of gender diversity in the making of graduate lives as the project did not offer participants the freedom to choose their gender beyond female and male, particularly given that gender is another crucial dimension of analysis, alongside social class, in this book. Nevertheless, the description of the rapport the researchers had developed over several years with participants was particularly remarkable, which, as the authors suggest, may potentially have created an avenue – and safe space – for participants to be open to researchers about their gender identities in transition in particular, as they had been about their perspectives and views about their graduate lives more broadly. The authors’ discussion on this theme signifies the importance of reflexivity in research more broadly and when writing a qualitative piece of work in particular – a great example for teaching research methods courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

This book also furthers critical and much-needed discussion on the broader aspects of inclusion and belonging. The authors have used these terms in different places to allude to the dynamic of who is included and who is left out when aspiring for, working towards, realising and finally claiming social privilege. They also reflect on how this varied sense of belonging with place (e.g., London) and space (e.g., home) is mediated by one’s social class positioning and gender identity, offering a nuanced understanding of how these positionings produce intersectional situatedness for graduates and how this interacts with the status of the university one graduates from.

Another set of incredibly valuable discussions is maintained in the final chapter which synthesises various concepts that the researchers had developed by delving into the rich, longitudinally produced, dataset. Here, the probes – such as the consideration of material resources, the symbolic struggle of who is regarded as a ‘right’ graduate and the interplay of social privilege and relative disadvantage in this construction, how conceptually ‘making a life’ after graduation is different to just ‘making a living’ (thus critiquing some of the ongoing discussions on employability in higher educational settings), the overall critical reflection on success in graduate lives, and finally a heartfelt reflection on pursuing a qualitative inquiry over a period of time – make this book unique in its own right and a must read for anyone invested in exploring education sociologically.

In a nutshell, the authors successfully present the complex realities of graduate lives in an accessible manner, and therefore I am confident this book will make for an interesting read for both established and emerging scholars in the field of sociology of education and will guide future scholarly discussions in this field.