Degrees of uncertainty: Exploring the gap between educational attainment and labour market outcomes for graduates in New Brunswick

Abstract

The belief that higher education guarantees upward mobility and financial security has become increasingly difficult to sustain in contemporary labour markets. In New Brunswick, recent university graduates face a disconnect between the promises of post-secondary education and the realities they encounter after graduation. Informed by Louis Althusser’s (1971) theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) forms of capital, this thesis examines how meritocratic ideologies embedded in educational institutions shape graduate expectations, and how the unequal distribution of cultural, social, and economic capital mediates labour market outcomes. This study consists of semi-structured interviews with 13 Liberal Arts graduates from the 2022–2024 cohort across New Brunswick’s three English-speaking universities, exploring how recent graduates perceive the value of their educational investments against labour market realities, and the strategies they adopt in navigating the gap between aspiration and reality. Findings suggest participants entered higher education through a combination of institutional streaming, familial influence, the expectation that a degree would provide security, and, for some, a genuine pursuit of learning. Upon graduation, however, most encountered entry-level wages that could not sustain independent living, and a hiring process personal networks often navigated more effectively than formal applications. Despite these struggles, participants consistently affirmed the personal and intellectual value of their education, even as they questioned whether the promise that hard work leads to success had ever genuinely applied to them. This thesis advances knowledge of how structural precarity is experienced individually in a region underrepresented in the literature on education to employment transitions. More broadly, it contributes to conversations about how meritocratic ideologies shape expectations even as the structural conditions needed to fulfil those promises are increasingly out of reach.