Navigating Inequalities: The Role of Social Class in Labor Market Transitions of Albanian Graduates in Italy

In the context of globalization and the rise of knowledge economies, studying abroad has become an essential strategy for enhancing educational competencies and broadening opportunities in an increasingly competitive graduate labor market. Extended transitions from university to employment have further motivated students to pursue international education as a means of improving their employability (Brooks & Waters, 2013). Studies have shown that international student mobility is predominantly a privilege of the middle and upper classes (e.g., King et al., 2011; Waters et al., 2011), often reproducing privilege rather than challenging social hierarchies due to its close ties to resource availability. Nonetheless, given the expansion of higher education, this paper focuses on the classed experiences of international students from the Global South and the inequalities they encounter in entering the labor market.

Situated within a Grounded Theory framework, this study draws on 20 problem-centered interviews with Albanian graduates in Italy, exploring their study-to-work transitions in the Italian graduate labor market. It analyzes the intersections of gender, ethnicity, age, and legal status, placing particular emphasis on how these experiences are mediated by social class.

The findings show that international student mobility of Albanians in Italy is also becoming a “family project” among lower-class families. Nevertheless, while graduates from middle-class backgrounds, whose aspirations and expectations were framed by their habitus and high levels of capital, were able to successfully negotiate the graduate labor market, their working-class counterparts faced significant challenges. They were largely unable to convert cultural capital into “network capital” (Urry, 2007) or economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986), often resulting in long-term employment in non-graduate jobs. Moreover, the findings suggest that, despite the presence of “graduate capital” (Tomlinson, 2017), successful career transitions often necessitate individual strategies that minimize societal differences and overlook ethnicity and workplace discrimination.