Same Degree, Different Start: How Family Background Shapes Graduates’ Early Careers
In their new article, “Stratified Ambitions: Family Social Origin and Unequal Early Career Outcomes among Russian Graduates,” published in the Journal of Youth Studies, Maksim Nikitin and Vera Maltseva look beyond familiar measures of graduate success such as salary or occupational status. Instead, they focus on the content of work itself: whether graduates enter jobs dominated by routine, standardised tasks or positions involving greater autonomy, problem-solving and cognitive complexity.
The distinction matters. Two graduates may hold university degrees and both be formally employed, yet their early careers can offer very different opportunities for learning, professional development and future advancement.
The study combines longitudinal data from the Trajectories in Education and Careers (TrEC) project with biographical interviews with Russian university graduates. The quantitative analysis reveals a clear social gradient. Graduates whose parents both have higher education are significantly more likely to work in non-routine jobs. This difference remains even after taking into account individual and educational characteristics.
In other words, obtaining a university degree does not entirely erase the advantages associated with family background.
The interviews help explain what may lie behind this pattern. Graduates from highly educated families more often described the beginning of their careers as a period in which they could explore, experiment and wait for a position that suited their interests. Uncertainty was something they could afford to navigate. Their parents also frequently acted as informal career advisers, offering knowledge about educational choices, occupations and the labour market while leaving the final decision to their children.
Graduates from families without higher education more often described a different logic. Stable employment and financial security tended to carry greater weight, and uncertainty was more likely to be treated as a risk to minimise. In these families, parents strongly valued higher education, but often had less first-hand knowledge of differentiated educational and professional pathways.
These differences also appeared in how graduates talked about a “good job”. For some, professional growth, interesting tasks and self-realisation were central criteria. For others, having a secure income and a stable position mattered more. The authors describe these socially patterned ways of imagining and pursuing a career as “stratified ambitions”.
The study therefore adds another dimension to the discussion of inequality after the expansion of higher education. Social differences do not simply disappear once young people obtain the same formal level of education. Instead, they can re-emerge inside the graduate labour market—in the kinds of positions graduates enter, the tasks they perform and the room they have to make longer-term career choices.
As Nikitin and Maltseva put it, inequalities in graduate outcomes are not only about “who gets a job”, but also “what kind of work they do”.