As part of the Paired Peers project, UWE Bristol’s Education and Childhood Research Group co-hosted a book launch for The Degree Generation: The Making of Unequal Graduate Lives.
The book launch took place at the Arnolfini on Monday 18th September, and was co-hosted with Bristol University’s (UoB) School of Education and Policy Press.
The book traces the transition to the graduate labour market of a cohort of middle-class and working-class young people who were tracked through seven years of their undergraduate and post-graduation lives.
Using personal stories and voices, the book provides fascinating insights into the group’s experience of graduate employment and how their life-course transitions are shaped by their social backgrounds and experiences of education. Critically evaluating current government and university policies, it shows the attitudes and values of this generation towards their hopes and aspirations on employment, political issues and cultural practices.
The book focuses largely on the 2nd phase of the Paired Peers project, a longitudinal qualitative study, funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The project aimed to study of impact of class and gender on student decision making, experiences and outcomes. Additionally, it explored the role of Higher Education in promoting and/or hindering social mobility.
The research outlined that alongside structural and cultural change, students and graduates from working-class backgrounds need access to resources and capitals. Additionally, the research highlighted that current government policy focuses on the ‘right sort of graduate’ in terms of earnings/particular jobs. This must be contested by universities to acknowledge the variety of ‘graduateness’: the participants involved became responsible, mature, secure, stable citizens, so valuable to society, and their experience of university informed this process.
The project team was led by UWE Bristol and UoB’s Emerita Professor, Harriet Bradley, and made up of a dozen Investigators and Researchers.
Richard Waller, Professor of Education and Social Justice at UWE Bristol, commented on the project:
The Paired Peers project has contributed significantly to our understanding of the processes behind universities acting both as vehicles for social mobility and also as sites for reproduction of existing social inequalities. That the already socially and economically advantaged young people in our study tended to get the ‘best’ graduate jobs didn’t surprise us, but as a project team including many very experienced university researchers and lecturers, learning about some of the processes by which this happens did.
The project has enjoyed significant impact in terms of the policies and practices of government bodies including the Office for Students and the Social Mobility Commission, and on a more local level, individual universities. It has led to award winning publications and a Research Excellence Framework impact case study recently included by the British Educational Research Association in their showcase of high impact educational research.
For more information on the Paired Peers Project, please email Richard Waller or view this release.