• Author: Elena Ayala-Hurtado (Princeton University)
• Title: The Expectational Liminality of Insecure College Graduates
• Journal: Sociology of Education

Graduation from college is a rite of passage for countless early twentysomethings, with their entry into the workforce traditionally seen as a positive symbol of newfound status.

However, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a tight job market, as well as stagnant wages and high levels of debt, had many young college graduates struggling. Elena Ayala-Hurtado, a postdoctoral research associate with Princeton SPIA’s Center for Research on Family and Child Wellbeing, wanted to know how these grads understood their social positions and worth amid their struggles, and how higher education shaped these understandings.

Ayala-Hurtado interviewed 127 struggling college graduates in the U.S. and Spain to find out.

“[I chose] these countries because they are advanced postindustrial nations where higher education has been expanding, young university graduates are increasingly insecure, and welfare regimes are not particularly supportive of young people,” she writes. “Moreover, the prevalence and structure of specific types of insecurity (e.g., unemployment, precarious employment, student loan debt, medical debt) and the higher education systems in these two countries vary substantially. Thus, comparing graduates’ perceptions in these countries can illuminate the extent to which specific structural conditions may shape graduates’ points of view.”

Ayala-Hurtado found that the graduates from both the U.S. and Spain described themselves as stalled or stuck. She refers to these feelings as “perceptions of ‘expectational liminality’” arising from the disconnection between what the respondents expected their collegiate experience to lead to and what it actually did lead to.

“Many respondents described the experience of being stalled or paused as a manifestation of the tension between their insecurity and their expectations of transformation and progress based on their status as college graduates,” Ayala-Hurtado writes. “Respondents understood themselves as having transitioned from being college students but without having attained the lives expected of college graduates.”

In describing this sense of liminality, the graduates’ responses were shaped by three separate narratives regarding the rewards following from higher education: about professional and financial success, life-course progression, and internal transformation. Despite differences between Spain and the United States, Ayala-Hurtado found the responses generally consistent.

“This finding suggests that people’s self-understandings in this context depend less on specific structural conditions and more on wide-ranging cultural narratives about education that structure expectations,” she writes. “It also pushes back on the common emphasis on foregrounding cross-national distinctions, showing that people in very different contexts can sometimes perceive themselves in very similar ways.”

Ayala-Hurtado identifies two primary implications of her study. The first is that the anxiety and frustration experienced by young college graduates facing socioeconomic insecurity have consequences for their mental health and decision-making.

“People who understand themselves to have ‘done all the right things,’ as many graduates in my sample insisted, … lose their sense of place in the social hierarchy,” she writes.

The second is that the respondents perceive higher education as valuable even though the success they expected their college experience to produce hasn’t yet happened. At a time when society at large is questioning the value of higher education, this is especially pertinent.

“Though graduates are critical of elements of the higher education system,” Ayala-Hurtado writes, “their narratives also legitimize that system and the inequality stemming from it.”