Hopes and inequalities in the transition to work: New data about a reappraised problem

As in many other countries, over the past 40 years, the Portuguese higher education system has been the target a process of great growth and a deep social change of its composition. We moved from a situation in which the population of this level of education was composed almost entirely of several fractions of the dominant classes, to another where a significant proportion of individuals from different social classes had access to that system. Faced with this reality, it is important understand if the titles granted by the higher education have achieved its purpose more instrumental, functioning as a vehicle for upward mobility. In other words, those diplomas have accomplished what many consider to be one of their promises, or have foundered faced with persistent and well known processes of social selectivity.

Proposals developed in this article are based on the data from a recent study carried out in Portugal, focused on the graduates of the University of Lisbon and the New University of Lisbon. The study’s primary goal was to understand the pathways to employment, taken by graduates of higher education, as seen from the development of an analysis model based on three dimensions of insertion: (i) the "objective situation of graduates’ work"; (ii) "resources mobilized to access the labour market"; (iii) and the "subjective relationships with the work". In this study, young people who completed their courses in 2004/05, in the largest public universities in Lisbon, responded to a survey which comprised a retrospective of the first 5 years of transition to work.

This paper aims to observe whether and to what extent, university degrees allow graduates from the undercapitalized classes climb positions - symbolic and economical - most prominent in the labour market.