Los titulados ante el desclasamientoUn análisis de la cohorte de treintañeros en España

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the question of class inconsistency from the perspective of educational and social status. This approach can be conjugated with and differs from other types of approaches (the intergenerational and the intra-generational social class mobility, and the educative) and has been called socio-educational downclassing. The research object of this study is composed by higher education graduates in a socio-educational downclassing situation, within the thirtysomething cohort and in the context of the current economic crisis. The central question that this thesis seeks to answer is as follows: how do people face the socio-educational downclassing in Spain? This question leads us to grasp the “objective meaning” of socio-educational downclassing, to later account for their “sense lived” (Bourdieu, 1989). This work is organized on the basis of two main objectives. The first one is to explore who is affected by the socio-educational downclassing. For this, the following questions are proposed: what is the trend of the phenomenon? What are its determinants? What is the social profile of downclassed people? The second purpose of this thesis is to analyze the experience of downclassing among graduates. In this regard, the questions we ask are as follows: what is the dynamics of their trajectories? What is their own interpretation of their situation? What are their strategic logics to face downclassing? To answer these questions, this thesis has opted for a complementary approach between a quantitative approach (ECV) and a qualitative approach (interviews). The particularity of this “sequential design” is that the data analyzed in the first phase serve to improve the collection and analysis of data from the second phase (Verd and Lopez-Roldan, 2008). In this latter part, three types of experiences are analyzed: “to reconvert” “to reposition” and “to resist”.