Conference Agenda

Higher education has long been associated with the promise of secure employment and upward social mobility. While participation in higher education has expanded, the number of stable, high-status graduate positions has not grown at a comparable rate, intensifying competition among graduates and employers for highly skilled candidates (Isopahkala-Bouret & Tholen, 2023). Consequently, transitions from higher education to the labour market have become increasingly uncertain across Europe, with rising levels of under-employment and persistent mismatches between educational attainment and occupational demands (Albert et al., 2023; Figueiredo et al., 2015; Tomlinson, 2012). These structural tensions strain the traditional promise of higher education, widening the gap between expectations of secure graduate employment and contemporary labour market realities.

In this presentation, we examine graduate recruitment fairs targeted at higher education students. These fairs provide students with opportunities to meet potential employers and explore career paths, while also functioning as institutionalised spaces where public higher education intersects with private, commercial actors (see Davis & Binder, 2016). Using assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), we conceptualise graduate recruitment fairs as socio-material assemblages, in which employability emerges relationally through interactions among higher education institutions, private companies, recruitment firms, students, and non-human actors such as recruitment platforms, branding materials, and spatial arrangements within market-oriented discourses. Employability is thus not an individual attribute, but a situated accomplishment co-produced and evaluated across heterogeneous actors.

Higher education institutions play a key role in these processes by organising fairs, selecting employer partners, and developing recruitment infrastructures and services. These practices introduce market-like logics into public higher education, shaping perceptions of which education is valuable and who gains access to selective recruitment pathways (Brown & Carasso, 2013; Slaughter & Taylor, 2016; Davis & Binder, 2016). While commercial and sponsorship elements are not new, recent developments emphasise the growing influence of market-oriented governance and the expansion of recruitment-related services, normalising competitive selection, self-marketing, and activities aimed at enhancing employability. These dynamics can also create exclusive networks that advantage certain partners and students, raising critical questions about equity and the role of public higher education in supporting academic values, equal opportunity, and the public good (Rivera, 2015; Tzoc & Gondal, 2023; Hogan & Thompson, 2021; Bok, 2003).

Drawing on ethnographic data from Finnish graduate recruitment fairs, this presentation addresses the question: What kind of employability assemblages emerge at graduate recruitment fairs? We examine how heterogeneous actors and material arrangements are brought into relation to produce particular configurations of knowledge, expectations, and practices around graduate employability. Finland provides a particularly instructive context, combining the highest unemployment rate in the EU with a long-standing tradition of public higher education and broadly accessible educational opportunities. By situating graduate recruitment fairs in Finland and across broader European contexts, this study contributes to international debates on graduate transitions, employability, and the evolving relationship between public higher education, labour markets, and market-oriented logics.

The paper argues for a sociological understanding of the role of partnership in corporate actors' engagement with Higher Education (HE) to recruit university graduates. Research shows that hiring practices vary systematically by graduates' institutional backgrounds, with elite firms preferring graduates from elite universities (Binder et al. 2016; Rivera, 2015). Yet by focusing predominantly on organisations and sectors, this literature overlooks how corporate partners establish networks with universities and shape access to graduate employment.

The aim of this paper is to clarify conceptually what recruitment partnerships and networks mean and how they work in the context of global higher education landscape. Our starting point is that profit-making is not universities’ primary purpose in building commercial recruitment partnerships. Such policies and practices serve a more complex set of goals and constituencies, such as the compelling contest between institutional status and rankings (Marginson 2016). Just like global corporations, global research universities (GRUs) strive to achieve high ranking and recognition within an international context, constructing institutional and social hierarchies under competitive pressure (e.g., Bloch et al., 2018; Rivera, 2015; Van Zanten et al., 2015). As a result, interconnections between universities and corporations, occur within both national and transnational spheres and characterise the positional competition in the global economy (Kauppinen et al., 2016; Brown et al., 2011).

For the purpose of conceptualising the role of university-corporate partnership networks in graduate recruitment, this paper takes a Bourdieusian approach in which higher education (HE) is seen as a ‘field’, that is, a structured space where different actors strategise regarding competitive positions and the unequal distribution of ‘capital’, while simultaneously reproducing social stratification (e.g., Isopahkala-Bouret & Tholen, 2023; Brown et al., 2011). Moreover, actors in the field are involved in a symbolic struggle over valued resources (e.g., Tholen, 2017). The field of HE itself is nested within broader sociopolitical and economic forces, which creates the backdrop of the highly complex setting in this study.

In sociological theory, ‘closure’ basically refers to exclusive processes of constructing social and symbolic boundaries to monopolise scarce resources for one group of people, while excluding others from using them (Tholen, 2017; van Zanten et al., 2015). ‘Elite closure’ in this study refers to incentives for high-status affiliations, that is, why GRUs prefer to connect with elite firms and vice versa and to create structured campus recruitment practices (Tzoc & Gondal, 2023; Kauppinen et al. 2016). The corporations, universities and individual graduates who identify themselves as part of the ‘global elite’ create alliances to further improve their distinct status (Binder et al., 2016; Rivera, 2015). However, the stigma associated with low-status affiliations disincentivises partnerships with less prestigious organisations for elite universities and corporations (Tzoc & Gondal, 2023).

For several years, the career choices of PhDs holders have received increasing attention from institutions. Initially seen as a channel for advancing public knowledge, the doctorate is now often praised as a generator of economic and technological value in a context of international competition. Thus, as elsewhere in Europe (for example, Passaretta & al., 2019), the proportion of PhD graduated employed outside academia has risen in France: according to the national IPDOC surveys, it concerns 51% of PhD holders one year after they obtained their diploma in the 2020 cohort, compared to 42% in the 2012 cohort.

This trend partly reflects deteriorating academic labour market in many European countries, particularly for tenured position (OECD, 2024). Those limited opportunities are perceived by PhD students throughout their programme (Depolo et al., 2001; Roach & Sauermann, 2017). In France, they may contribute to the decline of academic aspirations by the end of the dissertation (Calmand & Giret, 2020), or to an international mobility trajectory that can ultimately lead to long‑term expatriation (Bonnard et al., 2017).

As the first substantial experience in research, the doctoral studies years play a major role in shaping future careers (McAlpine & al., 2013). The discrepancy between initial expectations and the reality of a career in research can lead to shifts in aspirations (Depolo & al., 2001). Several studies indicate that, although academic careers are commonly associated with prestige, autonomy, and intellectual engagement, they are simultaneously characterized by heightened competition for tenure‑track positions and by workloads that have become increasingly demanding over time. Non-academic career can be seen as an alternative offering more stable working conditions or higher incomes, even though differences exist between the private sector and the non‑research public sector (Li & Horta, 2022). Consequently, although academia remains the dominant aspiration, its appeal tends to diminish over the years of PhD for a significant proportion of students (Depolo & al., 2001; Roach & Sauermann, 2017).

In France, doctoral training has evolved significantly in recent years to adapt to this evolving job market and broaden career horizons (Chevaillier & al., 2020; Batteau, 2023). Skills awareness is emphasized as PhD students tend to ignore those that are not directly related to scientific research (Bonnard & Giret, 2016), which can lead to neglecting non-academic careers (Horta, 2018). However, doubts remain about the effectiveness of these training programs in addressing the actual aspirations and needs of doctoral students (Tõnismann, & Bran, 2025).

Most available data predate these changes, and the factors influencing career planning during doctoral studies remain largely unexplored in France, particularly through longitudinal and quantitative approaches. The present research seeks to address this gap and to answer the following question: How are professional aspirations formed during doctoral studies in France?

The first objective is to identify the factors influencing different professional aspirations throughout the doctoral years. Although conditioned by their field of research and funding, many students undertake a PhD without a clearly defined career plan (McAlpine & al. ,2013; Sauermann & Roach, 2016). It is therefore relevant to investigate whether aspirations evolve in response to similar factors as students become more familiar with the research environment.

The second objective is to study more precisely the mechanisms leading to a change in aspirations. The contrast between desired job characteristics and confidence in the feasibility of planned careers may drive such changes. Training courses could influence both of these aspects by opening new career prospects, reinforcing interest in research or improving skills and their awareness.

The importance of teacher quality in student academic achievement is well-established (Chetty et al., 2014), but countries across and beyond Europe are struggling to improve the quality of their teacher workforce amid chronic teacher shortages, economic reorganization, and a surge in globalization that demands new teaching competencies (OECD, 2024). While efforts to affect the quality of the teacher workforce at later points in the teacher pipeline- via improved pre-service teacher education, hiring practices, and professional development- continue to grow globally, identifying and attracting higher-quality prospective teachers to the profession remains a comparatively efficient approach to improving teacher quality (Bartanen & Kwok, 2023). Considering the substantial evidence that individuals’ pre-career characteristics are effective signals of teaching quality (Jacob et al., 2018; Rockoff et al., 2011), and given that schools in many European countries struggle to provide students with sufficient numbers of effective teachers (OECD, 2025), research-based, early-timepoint teacher recruitment strategies appear to be an underutilized lever to improve teacher quality.

Despite this, research examining the job-choice processes and preferences of young people considering teaching is relatively scarce. The present paper seeks to fill this gap, asking broadly: (1) How do preferences for specific job traits affect young people’s consideration of a career in teaching? and (2) What are the implications of these preferences for crafting recruitment programs that contribute to building a higher quality teacher workforce? To answer these questions, we conduct an original discrete choice survey experiment with a national sample of early-stage university students in the United States. This approach allows us to capture the causal effects of specific job attributes (such as salary, professional autonomy, and job security) on the probability that a student prefers a teaching job over their ideal post-graduation occupation (Hainmueller et al., 2013).

This study extends recent methodologically similar work on preferences for job traits in teaching in several key ways. First, teacher recruitment strategies are most effectively implemented before individuals have invested considerable time, study, or finances into another field of work; interventions after such investments have been made are likely to be less effective, as students fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy and the path dependence of occupational choice (Dlouhy & Bliemann, 2018; Redekopp, 2016). However, existing work in this area relies on samples consisting primarily of individuals who have already begun specialized studies in their post-graduation occupational roles (e.g., De Cort & De Witte, 2025; Sims & Routledge, 2025). In considering alternative job options, students at this stage in their studies must weigh potentially attractive attributes of a theoretical teaching job against the financial and temporal resources they have already invested in their planned career path. This fact potentially limits the external validity of these studies’ findings to students’ decision-making processes at slightly earlier timepoints, when students have yet to invest significant time or resources into a career path and when recruitment strategies are likely to be most effective. By limiting our sample to students currently in the first 2-4 semesters of their university enrollment, the present study provides new direct evidence on the job trait preferences of students during this pivotal early period.

This study also builds on prior work by De Cort and De Witte (2025) to assess job attribute preference heterogeneity along individual characteristics (e.g., cognitive ability) that are predictive of teaching quality (Rockoff et al., 2011). By assessing preferences for job traits among subgroups of respondents with highest expected teaching quality, we make recommendations for teacher recruitment policies most likely to increase the average teacher quality of the teacher workforce.