Fractured Pathways: Educational Stratification and the School-to-Work Transition

Educational systems have long promised mobility, yet they increasingly produce fractured pathways from school to work. In dialogue with the Congress theme Global Sociology in Turbulent Times, this session examines how educational institutions themselves generate the bottlenecks that disrupt this transition under conditions of deepening precarity—and with what consequences.

We foreground specifically educational mechanisms: tracking and credentialing, the signaling power of qualifications, shadow education markets, and the institutional matching of schooling to work, such as new-graduate hiring regimes. These intersect with precarious employment—non-regular work, prolonged job-search limbo, NEET status, and platform labor—and with demographic decline reshaping enrollments, regional universities, and labor supply.

While we welcome contributions from any region, the Congress's location invites particular attention to East Asia: rather than treating it as a laboratory for theory generated elsewhere, we approach the region as a site of theory-making, taking its internal heterogeneity—across Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan—as an analytic resource rather than a unified case. We remain attentive to how systemic bottlenecks are often associated with psychosocial strain, from academic burnout to social withdrawal, recognizing that these manifest differently across societies.

We invite cross-national comparative and single-society studies alike, drawing on quantitative and qualitative approaches, that help reimagine a more just social contract for youth amid uncertainty.