This thesis adopts an anthropological perspective and an ethnographic approach to explore the following research question: ‘What do university graduates aspire to do with their lives, and how are such aspirations produced, negotiated, and revised over time?’. The research examines the aspirations of students and graduates from a prestigious university in New York City. Los Angeles emerged as a popular destination for graduates from this university and so two periods of fieldwork were conducted with graduates there. Data collection lasted 18 months spread over two calendar years (2017-18). The conceptual framework is person-centred and longitudinal, and the prime source of data is semi-structured interviews. The thesis features 16 of the 30 participants involved. Graduates in the study are shown to reckon with the compatibility of finding fulfilment through work and attaining future financial security. There was a tendency to perceive careers in terms of mutually exclusive extremes of either artistic expression or the acquisition of wealth. These patterns in graduate aspirations are characterised by high expectations coupled with an inability to imagine diverse careers. Graduates also conveyed high levels of parental involvement affecting their choices in education and work which resulted in complex entanglements of reciprocity, compliance, conflict, and constraint. The central thrust of the thesis which forms a novel contribution to knowledge is the notion of ‘fateful aspects of aspiration’ which has been theorised and published to conceptualise a closing down of perceived future options. Graduates are shown to feel constrained to certain paths and to ominous expectations of the future through parental pressures, student debts, and the specialisation of degrees. The longitudinal methodology reveals graduate responses to such predicaments. Reveries, regret, rationalisations, perseverance, and the revision of aspirations were means in which graduates reconciled the pasts and futures which they appeared to have and not have. This research makes empirical contributions to the study of graduate aspirations and graduate trajectories and both methodological and theoretical contributions to the conceptualisation of aspiration and the life course.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/99d5-xf60
Loewenthal, John
Supervisors: Alexander, Patrick; Butt, Graham; Dalrymple, Roger
School of EducationFaculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2020
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