Genres of Underemployment: A Dialogical Analysis of College Graduate Underemployment

Abstract

With more individuals obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees and the job market still recovering from the 2008 recession, the instances of college graduate underemployment (CGU) have increased throughout the United States. College graduate underemployment is an employment condition that is characterized by subjective and objective factors, most prominent of which is an incongruence between one’s education and one’s current job. The intriguing nature of CGU is how both employment and education merge together to influence the individual’s perception of their employment prospects, their educational experiences, and their identity. This study employs a dialogical qualitative analysis to examine CGU in order to ascertain how underemployed college graduates construct narratives of their experiences and define the value of their education. Twenty in-depth interviews of underemployed college graduates from different academic disciplines are analyzed with a dialogical genre analysis developed by Paul Sullivan. Two genre pairs—epic/romance and tragedy/black comedy—are employed to illustrate the correlating modes of experience for these participants, creating new narratives that problematize the dominant education-to-employment progression.

Keywords

• dialogical analysis
• higher education
• underemployment