ABSTRACT
For over eighty years the interaction of waves of university expansion and the economic cycle has ensured concern about the ability of the UK economy to absorb increased numbers of graduates, and the calibre of jobs they obtain has been a perennial debate (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Wolf, 2004). As early as 1937 the National Union of Students (NUS) observed that university graduates could ‘look forward only with uncertainty to employment of a kind appropriate to their academic achievements’ with many in the end having to content themselves with work ‘in which their capacities were not fully used’ (NUS, 1937: 8). Recent analysis suggests that between 2001 and 2012 the UK economy managed to absorb the increased supply of graduates from Higher Education, through the upskilling of existing occupations and creation of new ones, but a significant proportion found employment in non-graduate occupations (Green and Henseke, 2016). There remains a dearth of research which examines the experience of underemployed graduates, and how they make sense of the experience in career terms. In this chapter we report on an in-depth, qualitative study of underemployed graduates to explore how they made sense of and responded to their underemployment.
