What are the challenges for the current generation of graduate millennials? The role of universities and the changing nature of the graduate labour market are constantly in the news, but less is known about the experiences of those going through it. This new book traces the transition to the graduate labour market of a cohort of middle-class and working-class young people who were tracked through seven years of their undergraduate and post-graduation lives. Using personal stories and voices, the book provides fascinating insights into the group's experience of graduate employment and how their life-course transitions are shaped by their social backgrounds and education. Critically evaluating current government and university policies, it shows the attitudes and values of this generation towards their hopes and aspirations on employment, political attitudes and cultural practices.

Recognising diverse groups within society is a vital part of policy research and analysis, yet few texts have drawn together the breadth of experiences of welfare provision from a diverse group of citizens. This book fills this gap, by exploring how diverse citizens’ experience welfare provision. It aims to promote debate about the importance of social divisions in society and to address the gaps in research, in relation to race, ethnicity, disability, gender and LGBTQ. It comes at a crucial time as we emerge out of a decade of austerity, a global pandemic and Brexit, where issues of diversity have been at the forefront of debates and renews the call for analysis within social policy, particularly on issues of diversity in the 21st century context.

Selling Our Youth explores how the class origins of recent graduates continue to shape their labour market careers and thus reproduce class privilege and class disadvantage. It shows how class and gender combine to influence these young adults' opportunities and choices, in an era when this generation has been characterized as the first likely to end up worse off economically than their parents. The authors draw upon the landmark Paired Peers research project - an empirical longitudinal study of recent graduates in England - to explore their experiences of the contemporary globalized labour market. It demonstrates how many of these young, well qualified adults struggle to achieve stable and rewarding employment in the context of the overstocked graduate supply, precarious work and exploitative working conditions. Government policies of austerity, which were in place when these young people graduated in 2013, meant this generation faced the challenges of a lower wage economy and a housing crisis. The subsequent arrival of Covid-19 and its disastrous impacts on the local and global economy are making these challenges even tougher. The authors further explore the way differences of class and gender impact upon graduate trajectories.