Internships and the graduate labour market: how upper-middle-class students ‘get ahead’

Abstract

Internships have become an important means to enhance career prospects in an increasingly congested graduate labour market. This article used positional conflict theory to explore how university students from different social class backgrounds experience internships, and the implications for inequalities in post-graduation employment. One-hundred interviews were conducted with final-year undergraduates from three different class fractions at a Russell Group university (n = 50) and a Post-1992 university (n = 50) in England. This research design enabled the exploration of differences between the most socio-economically privileged students and others, independent of university attended. The findings demonstrated how upper-middle-class students at both universities were better able to mobilise family resources to progressively ‘stack’ multiple and ‘high-status’ internships, resultantly pulling away from their peers in preparing for the graduate labour market. It is argued that internships have emerged as a class strategy to ‘get ahead’ beyond the well-established mechanisms of elite universities and prestigious fields of study.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• graduate labour market
• internships
• social class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Russell Group is an association of research-intensive universities.

2 Post-1992 universities are former polytechnics or central institutions that gained university status by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 or in subsequent years.

3 In 2017/18, the median individual pre-tax income for taxpayers was £24,400 (HM Revenue & Customs 2020).