Unrealized professional aspirations inside Iran: the lived experiences of Sharif University graduates
Keywords: state
disillusion
mismatched expectations
ghayre-khodi
employability
aspirations
khodi
ideological capital

Discussions surrounding employability and job market aspirations of university graduates has been discussed across many disciplines, generations, and countries. In recent history, the global debate evolved twice due to the 2008 recession and the 2019 coronavirus pandemic. However, most debates continue to pivot around neo-liberal arguments of capital investments and an individual’s ability to adapt and persevere towards job market successes. Contrarily, these mostly Western-centered debates are not entirely sufficient when examining a non-Western country such as Iran, and its graduates’ lived experiences as they progress from higher education into the job market. If these Western understandings do not accurately explain the factors and actors involved in the Iranian context then should these arguments be revised? Or, has the Iranian State’s allotment of precarious access to the country left too little research and too many questions regarding employability, professional aspirations, and job market expectations of graduates inside Iran?
This thesis was the first of its kind to focus on graduates of Sharif University and investigated the following research question: how have Sharif graduates’ professional aspirations been shaped by their pre-university, within-university, and post-graduation experiences? The study was designed as a biographical approach focusing on the individual lived experiences of men with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the nation’s top university – Sharif. For security reasons, that will be explained below, women graduates were not interviewed. I intimately engaged with my five participants through four rounds of qualitative in-depth interviewing, with round three including a participant timeline. A combination of purposive and snowball sampling was used to select participants who varied in terms of their economic status, geographical upbringing, religious beliefs, ethnicity, pre-university education, and specialization in engineering. All interviews were conducted face-to-face in Tehran, Iran.
Participants reported experiencing, and often struggling with, certain obstacles that they perceived were imposed upon them by educational institutions, governmental entities, and State agencies that I call tentacles of the State. The participants narrated their encounters with these institutions and the people in the lives as a one-dimensional pathway they felt bounded by. Simultaneously, they recounted promises of a guaranteed successful life if they followed the one-dimensional pathway – that was veiled within the human capital argument. As the participants detailed their maturation from pre-university to within-university and into post-graduation, elements of the State increasingly emerged as key actors in ensuring the one-dimensional pathway was followed. The examples the participants provided illustrated an Iranian context as being contrary to a predominantly Western perspective where a fluid State system leaves opportunities for professional growth, societal progress, and institutional change. On the one hand, the participants grew up with underdeveloped individual aspirations that enmeshed with State expectations that left them uncertain about the guaranteed future they were promised. On the other hand, tensions grew as the participants identified their aspirations and invested in capitals but continued to feel limited in navigating the one-dimensional pathway inside Iran to try to realize their own aspirations.
The existing scholarship does not position the State as an active enabler of obstructing, diverting, and opposing graduates’ professional aspirations. The contribution of this study is the argument that a State, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran – which has been debated as an authoritarian and oligarchical state (Azimi, 2009) – can reframe promises of human capital theory and employability to reduce its graduates to a one-dimensional aspiration irrespective of how much the participants invested in capitals and improved their employability. Thus, an alternative way of thinking may be necessary in trying to understand the factors and actors that effect job market struggles.