Graduate employment and unemployment or underemployment are becoming increasingly important issues confronting not only global higher education research but also social and political debates in contemporary societies. In addition to the rapid social and economic changes resulting from the exponential technologies, the outbreak of the COVID-19…

Recent literature on education and work well recognises the 'crowding-out perspective' of how higher education expansion impacts the labour market experience of young people with different educational levels. However, the relationship between the labour market experience and young people's self-reported happiness remains less well understood. This…

In order to develop deeper understandings of elite integration and pathways to power, scholars in the fields of sociology of education and professions have highlighted the need for research to examine the role of knowledge content in the educational backgrounds of governing elites. Complexity around governance due to multifaceted challenges posed…

Graduate employability research typically focuses on young graduates' entry to the labour market. Little is known about the careers of adults who attain higher education degrees in mid-life. This article explores Finnish University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Master's degree graduates' mid-career trajectories using retrospectively collected…

In this study, we examine how student employment impacts higher educational trajectories in France. Focussing on undergraduates' educational outcomes, we show the consequences of different intensities and levels of recurrence of student employment on perseverance in higher education. We use data from a nationally representative four-year…

Declining employment prospects of graduates have been reported in the international literature and in Hong Kong. This casts doubts on the 'employability' of graduates of an expanding higher education sector. Yet, published patterns and trends of graduate employment outcomes do not tell us much about the contextualised processes that 'match' or…

Americans with a disability are substantially less likely to be employed than those without a disability. Among those with a disability who are employed, additional layers of inequality have been established, including wage differences and access to benefits. Education is generally viewed as a pathway to professional work with good wages,…

The Bologna process has contributed to redefining the concept of employability in higher education policies. In parallel, the professionalisation movement of French higher education has become more pronounced, notably through the development of work placements within the university curricula. In this article, we propose to re-examine the…

A fundamental shift is taking place in the way we think about the future of work and its relationship to education, training and the labour market. Until recently, expanding higher education was widely believed to result in higher earnings, reflecting an insatiable demand for knowledge workers. In the United Kingdom, this race to higher education…

This paper reviews evidence on two serious imbalances in the UK education and training system: The heavy bias in public spending on initial education and training (for 18-24-year olds) towards higher education at the expense of further education and vocational education and training. The very weak government support for continuing education and…

Employability development is a focus of contemporary engineering education, both abroad and in South Africa, from where this study emanates. However, pedagogic initiatives in service of this goal may fail to take into consideration the ideological underpinnings of this emphasis on employability, as well as of the curricula developed in its…

The question addressed in this paper is why expanding Higher Education (HE) has become the default policy position in England. One answer concerns the reluctance by employers to train. The paper adopts an historical perspective on the policy reviews into this issue which have displayed a remarkable policy amnesia, employers have not been engaged.…

Drawing on pragmatic and occupational sociology, this paper examines how individuals in Sweden embark on occupations that are in nascent stage and for work tasks that are weakly defined. I accompanied a group of aspirants as they moved from a higher vocational education programme into the labour market, following their learning journeys towards…

Changes in wages and other job characteristics during an individual's career are often the result of job mobility. Using a sample of Bavarian university graduates, this work analyses the effects that employer changes have on men's and women's wages. For this, employer changes are grouped into three categories in order to account for different…

In post-registration, professional healthcare education, learning outcomes should reflect the needs of several stakeholders, including the professionals studying the programme, workplace managers aiming to develop their workforce, and the educators teaching the programme. This study aimed to gain a multifaceted view of how these different…