‘This Isn’t Quite What I Expected’: Insecurity among Young College Graduates in the United States and Spain

Abstract

In recent decades, insecurity—a term I use to refer to both employment precarity and economic instability—has become increasingly prevalent in many advanced post-industrial societies due to the expansion of gig work, increasing debt, rampant inflation, and many other factors. While the attainment of a higher education credential can serve as a buffer against such instability, in recent years many young college graduates are nonetheless facing insecurity. My dissertation draws on insights from wide-ranging sociological literatures, including research on work, economic instability, social welfare policies, higher education, and cultural sociology, to examine the cross-national experiences, perceptions, and proposed strategies of young college graduates facing insecurity in spite of their high educational attainment. I draw on 164 in-depth interviews conducted between 2020 and 2021 with young graduates facing insecurity in the U.S. and Spain, two countries where young graduates are increasingly insecure and welfare regimes are not supportive of young people, but where the specific types of insecurity that are present vary. I ask three questions. First, how do national contexts, including employment policies, costs of housing and higher education, and more, shape graduates’ experiences and perceptions of insecurity? Second, what role does higher education play in how insecure college graduates understand their social positions and worth? And third, how do insecure young graduates navigate the tension between their relatively high educational attainment and their insecure experiences post-graduation as they imagine and plan their lives? First, my dissertation reveals the previously unexamined complexity of people’s understandings of insecurity, shaped by different configurations of insecurity present in different national contexts. Due to these different configurations, individuals in each country perceive insecurity as having starkly different qualities along three dimensions. Americans perceive insecurity as broad (that is, multifaceted), undefined (that is, unpredictable and having no clear demarcations between insecurity and security), and temporally recurrent, while Spaniards perceive insecurity as narrow, defined (that is, predictable and having clear demarcations between insecurity and security), and progressing steadily toward security. Second, my dissertation demonstrates that insecure young college graduates experience expectational liminality because of the disjuncture between their relatively high expectations of their lives after graduation based on their social status as college graduates and their experiences of insecurity post-graduation. Respondents in both countries draw on two shared narratives about the professional success and life course advancement expected of a college graduate to describe their sense of being stalled—no longer college students, but not quite college graduates. They draw on a third narrative about higher education’s cultivation of merit to express their continued expectations of progression due to their sense of internal worth and as-yet-unrealized potential. The rest of this dissertation focuses on investigating how these cross-nationally distinct understandings of the qualities of insecurity and cross-nationally shared conceptions of the social position and worth associated with college graduation shape graduates’ understandings of their lives and proposed plans toward the future. Over various chapters, I examine the consequences of these perceptions for (1) graduates’ conceptions of their top priority, attaining stability, which is conceptualized in different ways in each country; (2) graduates’ projections into the future, which feature a cross-nationally shared tempered optimism linked to cross-nationally shared narratives about college graduation, but vary along other dimensions; and (3) the strategies that graduates propose in order to work toward those futures. I discuss the implications of my findings for sociological theories of employment precarity and/or economic instability, higher education, and cultural theories about priorities, identities, projected futures, and action.