The dominant discourse about the role of higher education (HE) in the UK is focused on its suitability for preparing graduates for employment, measured by labour market outcomes such as graduate-level employment or wages. However, graduates’ wellbeing, values and broader ideas about the role of HE warrant further attention. This paper investigates how strength of career clarity throughout the university experience affects graduates’ wellbeing after graduation, and highlights individual and structural barriers to graduate employment in the UK and Italy. In the UK analysis they use the rich, nationally representative, longitudinal Futuretrack survey, which followed entrants to full-time HE in the UK in 2005/06 through their HE experiences and through to their early post-graduation outcomes. This part of the paper makes two contributions. First, we found that students’ ideas about their careers change over the course of their HE journeys, and higher career clarity scores at the beginning of the HE journey mattered less for graduates’ wellbeing after graduation than career clarity scores later in the HE journey and after graduation. Second, we found that certain structural factors (socioeconomic background, ethnicity, disability, but not sex) were negatively associated with wellbeing even after controlling for career clarity. This suggests that while career clarity can still be a useful resource for students and graduates for improving their wellbeing, it alone may not be able to entirely mitigate the impact of structural barriers. The Italian contribution to the paper investigates the young graduates’ job and career satisfaction, intended as two complementary indicators of work-related well-being and career thoughts, through the analysis of the cohort of graduate workers who entered the Italian labour market in 2014. Relying on a rich and unique dataset on Italian graduates’ early career paths (made available by AlmaLaurea), we examine the level of graduates’ satisfaction with their jobs, careers and earnings five years after graduation along with the relevant determinants. Our findings suggest that young graduates’ expectations and well-being evolve over time in an adaptive way. Italian graduates, initially declare that one of the most important reasons for their participation in higher education is the desire for career improvement. However, when such expectations are curtailed by first work experiences impacted by poor quality of the labour market, it comes out that the relatively high level of job satisfaction reported by Italian graduates does not stem from satisfaction with career and earnings, but it depends on non-monetary factors.

Agovino, M., Busato, F. (2017). From college to labor market: a transition indicator for Italian universities. Quality & Quantity, 51(6), 2577-2604.