Fighting Against Injustice and Discrimination in the Labor Market: Career Paths of Poor Young People Graduated from New Universities in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

In the period 2007-2015, 17 new national universities were created in Argentina, 8 of which are located in Greater Buenos Aires. These universities meant an expansion of university education offer, since they are placed in territories where there was no university previously. Moreover, these institutions were born with an inclusive mandate, implementing many of them strategies to improve the access and permanence in the university of young people from popular sectors. This implied, for many of these youngsters, to be the first to study at the university in their families.

Some of these new universities already have their first graduates. For these young poor students, graduation does not imply to face for the first time the challenges of the labor market, since they usually combine study and work, to be able to sustain themselves through university studies. Like other young people of popular sectors, they have had irregular career paths, with precarious and informal jobs and high turnover. They have experienced injustices and discrimination in the labor market.

The paper address the question: how has university education influenced these young poor people’s labor market trajectories? What challenges do they face as graduates in the labor market? Which competences and resources have they acquired in university and how do they use them in the search for a suitable job? How do they combine the skills and resources obtained from university with those developed in their previous work experience?

To answer these questions, I have reconstructed the career paths of graduates in Social Sciences and in Health Sciences, men and women, who attended two of these new national universities in Greater Buenos Aires: Arturo Jauretche University and University of Avellaneda. With this purpose, I have compiled life stories of young men and women recently graduated.