Low Socioeconomic Background Students’ Perceptions About the Value of Higher Education Degree to the Labor Market

The relationship between higher education and the labor market has been the subject of a lot of research over the last decades, after the expansion of knowledge-based economy that has transformed it. Investment in knowledge as promised by traditional rhetoric does not reflect the demands that students should meet on the labor market. Degrees likely to strengthen future prospects of inequalities between social groups. Based on semi-structured interviews with15 undergraduate students, the article examines how students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds understand the role that a University degree has in the labor market. It shows that students perceive their academic qualifications as having a declining role in shaping their employment outcomes, in what is considered to be a congested and competitive graduate labor market. Whilst academic degree is still seen as a significant dimension of employability, students increasingly are in need to add more value in order to gain an advantage in the labor market.