Graduating from college is widely associated with social and personal advancement, yet many young graduates are not experiencing these benefits. Drawing on 127 interviews with college graduates in the United States and Spain who face employment precarity or economic instability, this study asks: How do these graduates understand their social positions and worth? How does the institution of higher education shape these understandings? The data demonstrate that respondents in both countries largely describe themselves as stalled or stuck. I argue that these are perceptions of “expectational liminality” stemming from the disjuncture between respondents’ expectations and their experiences as college graduates. In addition, I show how three narratives describing the professional/financial success, life course progression, and internal transformation expected of graduates shape respondents’ sense of expectational liminality. I discuss the effects of higher education on graduates’ self-perceptions in uncertain contexts and the relevance of expectational liminality to other contexts where there are disjunctures between expectations and reality.

中文翻译：

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没有安全感的大学毕业生的期望阈限


大学毕业与社会和个人进步广泛相关，但许多年轻毕业生并没有体验到这些好处。通过对美国和西班牙面临就业不稳定或经济不稳定的大学毕业生的 127 次采访，本研究提出了以下问题：这些毕业生如何理解他们的社会地位和价值？高等教育机构如何塑造这些理解？数据表明，这两个国家的受访者大多将自己描述为停滞不前或停滞不前。我认为，这些是对“期望阈限”的看法，源于受访者的期望与他们作为大学毕业生的经历之间的脱节。此外，我还展示了描述毕业生预期的职业/财务成功、生命历程发展和内部转变的三种叙述如何塑造受访者的期望阈限感。我讨论了高等教育在不确定环境中对毕业生自我认知的影响，以及期望阈限与期望与现实之间存在脱节的其他环境的相关性。