Introduction

Employability is an influential concept that is shaping how policymakers, higher education professionals, and the public around the world think about and explain the relationships among higher education, the economy, and society in the early twenty-first century (Tomlinson & Holmes, 2017). The global recession wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, a reckoning with racial inequality in the labour market, and geopolitical turmoil has only exacerbated these long-standing concerns, as students graduate into a highly competitive and evolving labour market, making it likely that employability will remain a driving force in higher education policymaking and practice around the world for the foreseeable future.

However, the dominant framework that purports to explain the phenomenon of employability has long been critiqued for an over-simplistic and distorted account of the forces that actually shape a person’s job prospects (e.g. Moreau & Leathwood, 2006). Known variously as the “possessive” approach that focuses on an individuals’ acquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) (Holmes, 2013) or a “supply-side” account that ignores contextual factors in the labour market and society, the conventional wisdom about employability assigns all responsibility for finding a job to the individual student. Fuelled in large part by neo-capital arguments that investments in education, social networks, or even cultural knowledge increase the likelihood of returns in the marketplace (Lin, 2001), this individualistic and probabilistic narrative is shaping the contours of the debate on higher education, work, and society.

Within this narrative, certain KSAs and experiences that a student can pursue and acquire while in college are considered especially important, and one of these is the college internship. While the format and regulations of work-based learning (WBL) programmes vary considerably across disciplinary and national borders, internships in the United States (U.S.) typically involve a student working off-campus for an employer for several weeks on tasks that are ideally related to their academic programme and long-term career goals. A growing body of research points to the positive impacts of internships on students’ postgraduate outcomes, leading some to call them “door openers” to success and social mobility (Saniter & Siedler, 2014) and to include them in lists of “high-impact practices” (HIPs) that all college students should pursue or even be required to take (Kuh, 2008). With newly acquired KSAs and social networks theirs for the taking, an enterprising college student with initiative can take an internship, enhance their employability, and secure a well-paying job in the future. Or so the story goes.

But is getting a job really so simple—a matter of possessing skills, taking initiative, and acquiring experiences like an internship? The simple answer is no, and employability scholars have long emphasized that, instead, a students’ employment prospects are influenced by the complex interaction of different forms of individual attributes, forms of capital, and structural and institutional forces in society, education, and the labour market (Forrier & Sels, 2003; Hillage & Pollard, 1998; McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005). Other notable counterarguments to the initiative employability discourse include critical accounts that focus on the reproduction of inequality in systems of education and labour (e.g. Boden & Nedeva, 2010; Brown et al., 2003; Burke et al., 2017), students’ perceptions of their opportunities and potential in life (i.e. self-perceived employability) (Forrier et al., 2015; Fugate et al., 2004), and how well their environments support or inhibit them (Álvarez-González et al., 2017; Batistic & Tymon, 2017).

The growing focus on students’ perceptions and opinions is based in part on the recognition that flexibility and self-awareness in the face of a volatile labour market is a critical attribute (Hall & Moss, 1998), but also that career trajectories students take are mediated by the sociocultural milieu in which they live, work, and make decisions (Holmes, 2013). As graduates make decisions about where to live, which jobs to apply for, and whether to continue “upskilling” by pursuing more education, they are influenced by their families, peers, societal pressure, and perceptions of what opportunities exist in particular cities at particular points in time. Thus, research that illuminates first-person perspective of how various factors (i.e. supply- and demand-side) shape their decisions, or what anthropologists call “emic” accounts, is essential (Gracia, 2009; Morrison, 2014).

Unfortunately, such accounts of college students’ perceptions of their own internship experiences are uncommon, and are too often viewed as an unproblematic experience that can be measured solely by a “yes/no” question regarding their participation (or not). Further limiting the field is a paucity of empirical research on the multidimensional constraints that prevent some students from accessing these valuable experiences in the first place, despite growing evidence that programmes like study abroad (Covington, 2017) and internships (Hora et al., 2021) are too often pursued by well-connected and wealthy students. Consequently, a narrative has emerged that college students merely need to pursue certain programmes and HIPs to enhance their employability, as if they are unproblematic for students who are sometimes struggling with school, work, family, and health issues.

What is needed is a corrective to this fiction of both employability and access to HIPs like internships where the voice and perspective of real students is prioritized, and where a nuanced and multidimensional conception of employability advances a more realistic account of how graduates actually get jobs. At the heart of such an approach, where the lived experiences and processes whereby students interpret the complex, multidimensional factors shaping their internships and job prospects, is a commitment to emphasizing the emic over the etic (i.e. outsider or so-called objective accounts), and in truly focusing on student experience and sensemaking (see Cook-Sather, 2006). In addition, a critical perspective that accounts for the ways that intersecting identities and oppressive social structures inhibit opportunities for particular students (e.g. low-income black female students) is also warranted, given extensive evidence regarding the persistence of inequality and discrimination in U.S. society (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Núñez, 2014).

While a growing body of work in employability studies is adopting such a focus on self-perceptions of employability (e.g. Forrier et al., 2015; Morrison, 2014) and critical accounts of the inequities in the educational and employment sectors (e.g Burke et al., 2017; Gracia, 2009), the field could benefit from a robust and critically oriented framework of self-perceived job opportunities that builds on theory and method from other social sciences.

In this chapter I introduce the Student Perceptions of Employment Opportunities (SPEO), which is an approach that focuses on micro-level processes of perception and sense-making, where individuals perceive constraints and affordances in their sociocultural, economic, geographic, and political environments that impact their job prospects. This approach draws upon theories of perceived affordances from cognitive psychology and the learning sciences (Greeno, 1998), and critical perspectives of the reproduction of inequality from intersectional research (Crenshaw, 1991), particularly the multi-level framework of Núñez (2014). In elaborating Núñez’s (2014) work by focusing on individual perceptions of students’ employment prospects, I argue that insights into micro-level sensemaking processes make up a critical, yet understudied, aspect of the employability phenomenon.

To illustrate how the SPEO framework can be used in practice to study internships and employability, with a particular emphasis on generating actionable knowledge for campus professionals (e.g. career services and student affairs staff, faculty, and leadership), I also report findings from the analysis of data from a mixed-methods study of internships in the U.S. In this chapter I focus on qualitative data from Texas College (TC), a large comprehensive university on the U.S.-Mexico border, that are analysed using affiliation graphing techniques from social network analysis (SNA). Methods from SNA are particularly well-suited to visually capturing the dynamic interactions among multidimensional factors that are included in many employability frameworks, while also documenting how individual identity, perceptions of the environment, and structural features of labour markets all interact in a complex manner.

This complexity that characterizes actual student experiences underscores how uni-dimensional and probabilistic approaches to employability fail to capture the social reality of college students’ lived experience in a complex, contested, and disruptive world.

Limitations in Employability Research: Issues with Ambiguity, Dimensionality, and Causality

Before outlining the key elements of the SPEO framework, a brief review of theoretical issues and problems in the employability literature helps to situate the work in various interdisciplinary debates on the inter-relationships among cognition, culture, and context.

The concept of employability was not originally developed to address these concerns, but instead has its roots in mid-twentieth-century efforts to encourage full employment and inform policies to get chronically under- or unemployed workers back in the labour market (Gazier, 2001). The term found new life in the 1980s where a cultural and political milieu that embraced personal responsibility, reduced investments in public education, and the logic of human capital theory that conceptualized education in marketized terms as an “investment” that generated “returns,” all aligned with the term “employability” which neatly and implicitly encoded these positions (Gazier, 2001; McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005; Tomlinson, 2017).

However, employability has long been critiqued as a deeply flawed and conceptually incoherent (McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005), in part because it is seen (and used) as a “fuzzy” or elusive term with no clear and agreed upon definition (Cranmer, 2006), or a “chameleon concept” that takes on different forms and serves different purposes depending on the analyst and their goals (Knight, 2001). Of course, this is not unusual in social science. Concepts such as “skills,” “work,” and even “education” or “training” are what Bills (2004) calls “contested sociological concepts” that can suffer from a lack of clarity (i.e. specificity about the empirical referent for the concept), scope (i.e. application across cases), and systematic import or how well the concept can be used to build theory and testable hypotheses (see Pfeffer, 1993).

The presence of such problematic concepts is not simply annoyances for academics and detriments to the research enterprise—they can have real-world impacts. As terms like employability enter the popular lexicon, with assumptions regarding their meaning and validity, they become used by politicians, campus leaders, and other key stakeholders. As Holmes (2017) has pointed out, the observations of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1954) are relevant in the case of employability. Ryle (1954) argued that problems ensue when the colloquial or popular use of a term (i.e. its untechnical usage) that is rife with ambiguity and a reliance on tacit interpretations is used interchangeably with its use in formal or professional discourses (i.e. its technical usage). An important feature of a technical term is that professionals conversant in its proper usage draw upon what Ryle (1954) called “theoretical luggage,” or specific theoretical assumptions regarding its meaning and appropriate application.

In the case of employability, there is no “proper” usage or agreed upon definition, but consensus is growing that the theoretical luggage associated with the initiative employability perspective is flawed and should be rejected. Unfortunately, the term is still used colloquially in postsecondary research and policymaking as a proxy for the contested individualistic skills as possession approach, with little recognition that the term lacks consensus in the field as a technical construct. Thus, as an ill-defined “buzzword” (Philpott, 1999), employability continues to shape the discourse and policymakers’ imaginations as a narrative of meritocracy, upskilling, and personal ambition, with little attention to context or student agency. This is one reason why Holmes (2017, p. 365) argues that one of the pressing issues for employability studies is that of theory development, particularly regarding the dominance of the individualistic KSAs as “possession” narrative and its related theoretical luggage regarding causality and the long-standing structure-agency tension in the social sciences (see also Suleman, 2018).

As previously noted, critics of the individualistic approach contend that job acquisition is far too complex to be explained by a single or even a handful of variables, especially when the locus of attention is limited to a single student’s aptitudes and competencies. Other factors in the labour market, local or regional infrastructures, sociocultural forces, personal circumstances, and discrimination all may play a role in determining if a job applicant gets an interview or job offer.

More recent definitions tend to adopt a more expansive and multidimensional interpretation of the term, including the works of Fugate et al. (2004), Finch et al. (2016), Holmes (2013), Forrier and Sels (2003) and Tomlinson (2017), which is a development that generally tracks with Gazier’s (2001) observation that the field is evolving from the initiative employability perspective to more multidimensional models (i.e. the interactive employability account). Similar accounts of different approaches to employability research include distinctions between “supply-side” or “demand-side” perspective, the former focusing on students and postsecondary education on the one hand as the supply of labour, and the latter speaking to labour markets and employers as the demand side of the equation (McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005).

This dichotomy, which implicates the classic structure-agency tension in the social sciences (i.e. does free will dictate behaviour or is it shaped by social structures?), is also the source of considerable discussion in the employability literature, as some argue that scholars should address both “individuals’ agency on the one hand and social structure on the other” (Tomlinson, 2017, p.6). Consensus is growing that this is a more accurate approach than the individualistic view, and multidimensional models that account for these varied forces are becoming more prevalent in the conceptual literature on employability and empirical work on the topic (e.g. Álvarez-González et al., 2017; González-Romá et al., 2018; Goodman & Tredway, 2016; Jackson, 2016).

However, it is important to note that a particular stance on causality underpins most individualistic and multidimensional models—that of probabilistic and linear accounts whereby certain variables predict change in other variables (i.e. student employment or wages). In other words, employability is about the “chance” or “probability” that an individual will find and secure employment, largely due to the complex array of forces that influence a person’s employment prospects in a given time and place. In some cases, this stance on causality is made explicit, as in the case of Forrier and Sels (2003), whose definition of employability emphasizes the “chance” of an individuals’ success in internal or external labour markets. For Forrier and colleagues (2015), the central issue in the field is which types of factors, such as individual-level KSAs or features of labour markets, increase or decrease the probability of a person securing a job. Thus, regardless of the locus of attention—micro-, meso-, macro-levels or a combination of them all—the primary empirical problem is one of identifying which of these factors most predicts a college graduates’ success in the labour market.

Thus, many employability researchers adopt what the sociologist John Levi Martin calls “third-person causality,” where “objective” measurements of changes in one (or more) independent variables affect or cause changes in dependent outcomes (2011). Martin (2011) critiques this dominant stance on the grounds that social scientists have “decided that the best explanation is a ‘causal’ third-person explanation, in which we attribute causal power to something other than flesh-and-blood individuals” (p. 5), or first-person accounts. Such an argument is not to diminish the explanatory power of statistics or an endeavour to replace quantitative methodologies with qualitative approaches, as both can embrace an over-simplistic notion of human behaviour, decision-making, and social mobility. However, Martin’s (2011) argument is simply that the third-person view of causality embedded in the general linear model and many of the social sciences has become so reified and taken-for-granted that it is a default and overly simplistic model of how the world functions.

A similar situation applies to the study of employability, where the view that job acquisition or graduate wages six-months after graduation can be solely attributed to an internship, “soft” skills, or access to personal transportation is untenable. Instead, as Tomlinson (2017) and others argue, these employment outcomes are more likely due to a complex interaction of agentic and structural factors, and for Martin (2011), the corrective is not to build ever more complex multidimensional models that attempt to isolate additional variables that can predict these outcomes but instead to embrace a rigorous science of subjectivity that complicates (and complements) this narrative.

Additional Insights from Cognitive Psychology and Intersectionality Research

Fortunately, many alternatives to a probabilistic approach exist, with several employability scholars actively adapting them to study the forces that shape job acquisition from a more relational and critical perspective (see Burke et al., 2017; Clark & Zukas, 2013; Kalfa & Taksa, 2015). Much of this work builds on the theoretical tradition initiated by Bourdieu (1977), whose views on field theory also animate much of Martin’s (2011) arguments for an approach that prioritizes actor-environment dynamics, where regularities or structures in the social, political, and economic fields are perceived by individuals in ways that constrain or delimit how individuals are positioned in society and their subsequent actions.

In this chapter, however, I contend that insights from cognitive psychology are particularly useful in elaborating on the ways that an individual’s perceptions of their environment shape their decisions, behaviours, and notions of which opportunities are available (or not) to them. A core idea in early cognitive science was that people are neither passive agents subject to the structural forces in their environment, nor are they entirely rational actors who make decisions based on cost-benefit analyses (Martin, 2003; Simon, 1982). As a result, it is neither structure nor agency that dictates human behaviour, and cognition and decision-making are best viewed not as an “in the head” mental activity but a process that is shaped by our political, sociocultural, and institutional environments (Greeno, 1998).

A critical part of this process is how people internalize simplified mental models of the world to minimize cognitive load as they navigate a complex, stimulus-laden world (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002). An influential type of mental model is called a “perceived affordance,” which encodes the types of actions or behaviours that a person perceives as being possible, desirable, and tenable in a given situation. For instance, a low-income, first-generation, Latinx student growing up in a border town may perceive a four-year university or a prestigious internship in New York City to be financially and socially inaccessible to them.

In addition, insights from intersectionality theory also have useful implications for employability research. For instance, we have recently drawn upon intersectionality theory to better address the structural racism that shapes college-workforce pathways in the U.S. as well as multi-level relations among individuals, organizations, and broader social structures (Hora et al., 2022). First conceptualized by Black feminist theorists in legal studies, the idea of intersectionality argues against “single-axis” or single variable explanations of inequality and oppression, instead offering a heuristic for “open-ended investigations of the over-lapping and conflicting dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities,” (Cho et al., 2013, p.788). In this way, an intersectional approach is not dissimilar to employability studies that reject the individualistic turn and instead adopt a multidimensional or processual approach. In examining contextual or “supply-side” factors, however, intersectional scholars are not interested in merely identifying which ones impact student trajectories, but are explicitly focused on the ways that power, systemic racism, and historic inequalities have constrained opportunities for students of colour (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Núñez, 2014).

Some researchers have critiqued the ways that intersectionality is used in higher education research, however, for a myopic focus on individual, micro-level social categories (e.g. race, gender) at the expense of examining the broader systemic forces that also impact individual lives and trajectories (Harris & Patton, 2019). An approach to intersectional studies that avoids this problem was offered by Núñez (2014), whose multi-level model of intersectionality is designed to examine how social identities and categories unfold and operate within different “arenas of practice as situated within particular times and places” (p. 85). Developed initially to focus on the experiences of Latinx1 college students in the U.S. as they navigated an often hostile educational system and labour market, Núñez’s (2014) framework posits three levels wherein social action takes place:

  • Level 1: Social categories as socially constructed and overlapping identities that shape social hierarchies and positions such as gender, race, and first-generation college student status.

  • Level 2: Multiple arenas of influence represent spheres of social activity that overlap and include organizational venues, interpersonal relations, and how individuals create narratives about their opportunity structures (i.e. their experiences with and perceptions of events).

  • Level 3: Historicity refers to the macro-level contexts in which social categories and arenas of influence operate, such as labour markets, international politics, historical events, and features of local geographies.

As with multidimensional frameworks of employability, Núñez’s (2014) approach takes into account a variety of forces that shape students’ opportunities or lack thereof, which is especially important for students of colour who face a variety of challenges during their lives. In particular, the way that college and university programmes and support systems help or hinder students is highlighted in this work, based on the contention that these organizations are not race-neutral or de-contextualized phenomenon (Ray, 2019), but instead embody in their very policies and practices certain views on privilege and power.

With insights from these disparate theoretical traditions in hand, and previously noted concerns regarding the limitations of the initiative employability discourse and the need to highlight student voice and experience with internships and the labour market, my colleagues and I have developed a new approach that integrates these ideas and considerations—the SPEO framework.

A New Approach: The Student Perceptions of Employment Opportunities (SPEO) Framework

The SPEO framework approach builds on an extensive body of prior research from my research group, where we have studied topics ranging from organizational change in higher education (Hora, 2012), faculty beliefs about teaching (Hora, 2014), disciplinary cultures in higher education (Ferrare & Hora, 2014), and employer conceptions of skills (Benbow & Hora, 2018; Hora et al., 2021), where a focus on individual perceptions of opportunity and action within the unique cultural, political, and organizational milieu of postsecondary institutions has been the central concern. In designing our studies, the following theoretically commitments guide the work:

  • A multidimensional account of the forces that shape career and educational opportunity that embrace both “supply-” and “demand-side” factors;

  • Emphasis on agentic perspectives and how individuals perceive how these multidimensional factors act to constrain or afford their behaviours;

  • The probabilistic conception of causality is rejected in favour of a first-person perspective;

  • The way that individuals’ intersecting membership in different social categories (e.g. race, gender) influence how societal structures act to oppress or support them is of primary importance;

  • A critical perspective on the ways structural inequality and discriminatory practices are present throughout society and shapes employment prospects is prioritized; and

  • A robust yet user-friendly methodology that generates actionable insights for key stakeholders (e.g. campus leaders, faculty, and staff) is a primary goal.

More recently, we have used these ideas and methods to study a small portion of the employability phenomenon—that of college internship participation in the U.S.

Ultimately, analyses of internship access and student employability need to avoid approaches that ignore micro-level individual student identities (Level 1 or L1 in Nuñez’s framework), the meso-level of institutional programmes and support services (L2), and macro-level forces such as the historic and structural political and socio-economic inequalities facing Latinx students in the labour market (L3)—and how each of these levels interacts with one another in the lives of college students (Garcia et al., 2019; Nuñez & Sansone, 2016). In the SPEO framework, I extend Núñez’s (2014) framework by more explicitly emphasizing the micro-level of individual students and their perceptions about the opportunity structures available to them. Essentially, I argue that perceptions of these macro-level contexts—or perceived affordances—may dictate the types of jobs, educational opportunities, and pathways to social mobility (i.e. their employability) available to Latinx students and their families.

In the case study outlined in this chapter, I report selected findings from a larger paper and highlight a unique method used to enact these admittedly complex theoretical ideas in practice. One of the challenges facing agent-centred research that strives to account for a complex array of factors and variables that impact individual behaviours is how to do so without accounting for all possible variables which can result in unwieldly or unintelligible research. In my previous work, I have partially addressed this challenge by using observational and interview methods to generate textual data, which have been inductively analysed and then visualized using graphing methods to depict local accounts of organizational processes and personal decisions about studying, teaching, and hiring decisions.

While analysing qualitative data using network analytic techniques is increasingly common (e.g. Pokorny et al., 2018), it has not frequently been used to study agentic perspectives on employability or intersectionality, and in this chapter these methods are used to depict and analyse qualitative data about Latinx students’ perceptions and experiences of the ways that identity, embodied practices, and structural and systemic forces impact their internship opportunities and, subsequently, their prospects for career development and future employment.

An Empirical Example: Internship Experiences of Latinx Students at a Texas University

The data reported in this chapter are drawn from a larger mixed-methods study of college internships at 14 postsecondary institutions across the U.S. undertaken by the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A more detailed report of the analysis summarized here is included in a research article (Hora et al., 2022), and in this section I provide a snapshot of the study’s methodology and key findings.

Texas College (TC) is a public regional comprehensive four-year university that became a Hispanic Majority Institution in the 1980s and is located near the Mexico-United States International Border within a mid-sized city. The sampling frame for the study included students in their second half of their degree programmes, and those not in programmes with mandatory and highly regulated practicums (e.g. teacher education). After completing a survey, students were asked to participate in a focus group, and 30 students who equally represented the intern and non-intern groups were randomly selected from this pool. Twelve Latinx students met with the study team, some who had taken an internship (n = 6) and some who had not (n = 6). Both were included in the focus groups given the interest on understanding barriers to internship participation, and students were asked about their experiences and potential obstacles to internship participation.

For the analysis of focus group transcripts, with the SPEO framework in mind, I engaged in an open coding process, inductively creating codes based on explicit references to a category in the framework (e.g. L1, L2, or L3) (Charmaz, 2014; Ryan & Bernard, 2003). This phase resulted in a list of 44 discrete factors grouped into the three levels, and these codes and how they were mapped onto the multi-level model of Núñez (2014) are provided in Table 10.1. Then, I documented code-code associations and organized these code “chains” according to larger themes (Miles et al., 2013). Then, techniques from social network analysis were used to visualize relationships among individual codes by creating a graph that depicted the pairs of codes that students had indicated were interrelated with one another. The size of each node in the graphs was also adjusted to represent a measure of node centrality—betweenness—which refers to the number of times a particular code lies on the shortest path between other pairs of codes (Borgatti et al., 2002).

Table 10.1 Themes identified in the data according to the three levels of the Student Perceptions of Employment Opportunities (SPEO) framework
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Findings

The themes reported below were derived from an inductive analysis of the interview data, which began with the identification of individual codes that were based on the three levels of the framework—L1 of social categories (e.g. race, academic major), L2 of embodied practices, and L3 of historicity (e.g. labour market conditions). Within the L2 category of arenas of influence, we identified sub-themes that include cultural factors (e.g. family-related norms), organizational factors (e.g. features of college programmes), and experiential factors (e.g. perceived affordances about the students’ environment). These themes and frequency that students discussed are included in Table 10.1.

Next, we analysed how students made connections between factors at levels 1, 2, and 3 with respect to their internship opportunities.

Factors Leading to Student Perceptions of Not Being Competitive/Limited Opportunities

Four students spoke about how several issues (e.g. academic major, being low-income, gender) interacted to give them the sense that they were not a competitive in the local or regional internship market, much less for positions in prestigious firms located in the big cities on the East and West Coasts of the U.S. For example, one student who did not participate in an internship, stated:

(My department—computer science) brings in (former interns) from big companies like Microsoft and Google who say, “I got an internship,” but it’s one guy out of a million people that apply, so it feels kind of like a lie. It feels unobtainable. It would be nice if they brought in more obtainable internships. Because I mean, we’re not a very high achieving city. It’s nice to shoot for the stars I guess, but when it is kind of like a dream it’s hard to visualize.

For other students who discussed the issue of having limited internship opportunities, some did mention how their city is “not high achieving” along with their own race and gender (i.e. being a Latina), which collectively led to their feeling uncompetitive with other job seekers while seeking a position. In this case, the Latina student who participated in an internship described her strong feeling of “imposter syndrome” where they felt like they did not belong at financial services firm where she ended up interning, and where ultimately she was not taken as seriously as the mostly white male cohort of interns. In other cases, the main factor limiting students’ opportunities had to do with finances, where students had to work paid jobs to cover living expenses for themselves and/or their extended families. One student simply stated, “Leaving my [regular] job is simply not an option,” and thus an internship was not possible given the low (or no) pay associated with many internships. These findings highlight the fact that a variety of interrelated factors—and no single issue, characteristics, or form of capital—led these students to feeling uncompetitive in the internship labour market.

Influence of Pay and Housing on Students’ Ability to Take Internships

Another key finding in this study was how the expenses associated pursuing an internship—specifically the low pay and/or housing and relocation costs—were prohibitive and kept them from even considering applying for one. For instance, a female art major shared that the costs of an out-of-state internship, which would be required since few art opportunities existed in their part of Texas, when coupled with the fact that many art-related internships were unpaid and that their immigration status as a non-U.S. citizen was potentially problematic, made an internship not an attractive or tenable proposition. In another case, however, two scholarships from TC enabled a student in computer science to cover the costs of housing in an expensive West Coast city during the internship.

In another case, a student discussed gendered family care obligations which her brothers and male peers do not have, as part of her life situation that impacted her ability to seek an internship, sharing that:

Being a female, we have different expectations, you know, and being Mexican like having to cook and clean and all that stuff to where like nowadays people, you know, I want to be more educated and then not really my priority to do cooking and cleaning. But, you know, it's still expected of me [by my family] to be like that perfect woman I guess you could say.

Consequently, micro-level factors often associated with supply-side and student-level accounts of employability (e.g. financial situation, racial identity, and academic major) did not shape the students’ opportunities on their own, but instead intersected with organizational supports (i.e. subsidies and scholarships) and structural forces (e.g. housing costs, internship pay by industrial sector) to shape these students’ opportunities and access.

Role of Texas College as Vehicle for Social Capital/Information Resource

The final theme from the study that helps to illustrate the SPEO framework for employability in action pertains to social capital and its dynamics within Texas College. Several students mentioned the role of TC as a conduit of information about internship opportunities, and students’ subsequent sense of which opportunities existed and how competitive they would be for these scarce positions in the national internship marketplace. Essentially, the structure of the institution (e.g. its courses and faculty, career services units, websites) shaped the social relationships, networks, and information resources that students had access to, and unfortunately these informational pathways were largely seen as inadequate at TC.

Overall, TC students generally felt that their departments did not provide sufficient or accessible information about internships. In one case, a working student who did not have time to review the large number of emails from TC—some of which were about internships but many were about events and programme administration—simply deleted these messages, raising questions about the best medium for reaching working students (e.g. text messages, flyers on hallways, social media.). In other cases, the best information about internships were gleaned during office hour visits with faculty or in off-hand comments during a lecture, which reflect the two primary points of contact students have with the people at TC who probably had some of the most up-to-date knowledge about internships in their fields. For too many students, however, they lacked the time required to go to office hours or missed these references to an internship opportunity, which resulted in a lack of knowledge about whether internships even existed in their fields and how to go about pursuing a position.

How Do these Multi-Level Factors Intersect in the Lives of Actual Students?

To visualize the ways that factors at the three levels of the SPEO framework operate across multiple students’ lives, I graphed the data using social network analysis techniques, which illuminate the ways that multiple levels of student identity, experience, and environments intersect to shape their perceptions of internship opportunities.

In the graph (see Fig. 10.1), the thickness of the lines connecting codes depicts the frequency with which they were explicitly linked (i.e. the thicker the line, the more frequently they were linked by students). The three symbols next to each code represent one of the three levels of the SPEO framework (e.g. level 1 as social categories, level 2 as embodied practices, and level 3 as historicity), with their size adjusted to represent the number of times a code lies on the shortest path between other pairs of codes (i.e. betweenness) (see Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1
An affiliation graph with nodes representing level 1, level 2, and level 3. It forms a network through the nodes representing actual internship experience, many opportunities, current employment, discrimination, and others for different levels.

Affiliation graph of student perceptions of their internship opportunities across multiple dimensions

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This graph provides a visual snapshot of the multi-level, intersectional forces that affect Latinx students attending a HSI as they engaged in the world of internships. In its complexity, the graph captures the interrelated nature of the forces that shape a college students’ employment prospects, but in a way that does not adopt a “third-person” view of causality (i.e. changes in one variable explain changes in another). Instead, it is the relationships among factors across multiple levels of social action—the individual, organizational, and contextual—that students perceive as they navigate the world. In this way, the techniques of SNA and affiliation graphing, along with the multi-level elements of the SPEO framework that prioritize student agency and voice, provide a robust way to complicate the employability discourse away from the individualistic and probabilistic view and towards a more dynamic account of social mobility and job acquisition.

Conclusions and Next Steps

The discourse of employability is in dire need of re-framing, where the fiction of individual students’ KSAs or capital(s) being the primary—if not the sole—determinants of their social mobility and success in the labour market is finally put to rest. Efforts towards such a correction have been made for decades (see Brown et al., 2003; Gazier, 2001; Holmes, 2013; Mcquaid & Lindsay, 2005; Tomlinson, 2012), but the dominant narrative of graduate employability remains an individualistic, human-capital dominated story of merit, hard work, and individual skills.

One of the aims of this volume is to contribute a set of new ideas and conceptual frameworks for thinking about higher education and its relationship to society and the labour market, and in this chapter I build upon prior efforts to develop multidimensional models of employability and intersectionality (Núñez, 2014) to propose a new, agent-oriented approach that embraces key elements of these earlier efforts—a critical focus on structural inequality, the primacy of student agency, and how individuals’ perception of their opportunity structures plays a critical role in the employability debate. With these conceptual tools set forth in the SPEO framework, analytic techniques such as social network analysis are offered as a novel way to empirically study the multidimensionality of employability in action. Ideally, this approach can both contribute to the project of empirical studies of employability and generate data that practitioners can find useful, engaging, and actionable for making changes on their own campuses.

From the case of how students at Texas College perceive their opportunities in the internship labour market in the U.S., one key conclusion salient to campus professionals can be drawn. The students make clear that the problem of accessibility to WBL programmes like internships is not solely a structural issue related to labour market conditions, but the role that students’ social categories and identities play in inhibiting access through their perceptions of what is possible must also be considered. The fact that female students in the study also highlighted the dynamics among race, gender, and employer discrimination indicates that such issues and constraints may be more acute problems among Latina students. Similarly, as noted by other scholars (e.g. Medina & Posadas, 2012), family is often a source of support and motivation but also of tension for both Latinx men and women, due to the potent gendered familial expectations and obligations about work, careers, and commitment to the family (Gándara, 1995; Risco & Duffy, 2011). This suggests that career services and academic affairs personnel should begin paying more attention to the way that access—whether perceived or actual—to employment opportunities can be shaped by race, class, gender, and other individual-level attributes.

Based on evidence that minoritized students may feel a low sense of belonging in white-dominated workplaces, and women experience both gendered norms for work within their families and discrimination in the workplace, it is time to adopt an approach to “culturally appropriate” internships that dispenses with the fiction of meritocracy and enacts adequate and appropriate support systems for non-majority students.

Furthermore, an intersectional and relational lens highlights the fact that internships are subject to a variety of level 3 contextual forces that are beyond the direct control of an individual college or university, but whose potentially negative effects can be ameliorated by targeted programming and student supports. One example of these broader field effects is the discipline- and occupation-specific nature of the internship labour market, with internships in business and STEM majors being more prevalent and accessible. In addition, the geographic isolation of the city where TC is located makes relocation expenses essential for students seeking positions in firms located in distant, often expensive, cities. A depressed local economy with few internships results in a scarcity of opportunity for place-bound students. Each of these findings indicates that to meet the needs of their students, career advisors and leadership should pay close attention to helping students—especially outside of business and STEM fields—find and successfully pursue internships outside of the competitive and limited local labour market.

Ultimately, with the analytic lens offered by the SPEO framework, it is clear that employability writ large, and the landscape of internships more specifically, is one of exclusion and gatekeeping that disadvantages too many students. If the field of higher education is sincere about advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion along with the benefits of WBL for their students, it will need to deal with the fact that, at the present time, these two goals are not compatible and will require a not inconsiderable investment of time, money, and energy to rectify these long-standing inequalities.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In this chapter, I use the term Latinx which is a gender-neutral term that is increasingly used by higher education scholars to refer to peoples with Latin American ancestors (e.g. Salinas Jr & Lozano, 2019). While the term Hispanic is also widely used, some view it as an externally derived and imposed category, with the primary referent of colonial Spain (Núñez, 2014).