Disrupting assumptions about graduate employability: exploring culturally and linguistically diverse university students’ graduate capitals in Australia

ABSTRACT

Employability is a powerful discourse in higher education, yet as a driver for policy and practice it has not translated into an uplift in graduate outcomes for all student groups. In particular, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Migrant and/or Refugee (CALDMR) students experience inequitable graduate outcomes and access to meaningful employment opportunities. Drawing on a national study of career advisors and CALDMR students’ experiences of how Australian universities support their career development, we examine CALDMR students’ employability through the conceptual framework of graduate capitals. We make two key contributions: firstly, we offer insights into staff and student perceptions of university approaches with CALDMR. Secondly, we identify a lack of linguistic and cultural diversity conceptualisations of employability by examining the experiences of CALDMR students and staff through the lens of graduate capitals. We disrupt the assumptions and presumed familiarity with cultural knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• higher education
• culturally and linguistically diverse migrant and/or refugee students
• graduate capital
• monolingual bias
• Australia

Acknowledgement

We thank Dr Phillipa Bellemore for her critical eye and her wonderful editing work on this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. While we have already noted the federal government continues to report data on the nebulous ‘NESB’ category, this information is not necessarily used by universities to inform support because of they are no longer a targeted equity cohort.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, Curtin University [2019/07].