Student-workers in Higher Education in Turkey

The research explores how the aspirations of young people participating in a newly massified HE system are influenced by the recent expansion of student employment, in the context of Turkey. The ongoing cost of living crisis in the country is the primary reason why several students take up term-time and seasonal jobs in mostly non-graduate industries. The project explores how this impacts on students' aspirations regarding HE and labour markets, leading to concomitant changes in their social relations and political attitudes. It will employ multi-sited ethnography together with in-depth interviews with student-workers.

HE expanded at an unprecedented pace in Turkey, and every city came to have one after the establishment of 41 public universities between 2006-8. Whilst newer institutions lacked the proper infrastructure to give quality education, they enabled access and promised social mobility to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds (Polat, 2017). The establishment of private universities and the constant rising of admission quotas of older institutions added to the expansion, and almost half of school leavers now end up in university education (Tekerek, 2023). Yet, this expansion occurred in the context of globally declining graduate prospects (Tomlinson, 2017), which is most strikingly observed in Turkey, one of the few market economies in which graduate unemployment was higher than that of non-graduates until recently (OECD, 2020). The research will hence investigate what other affects besides disillusionment, each with its socio-political implications, could be structuring student-workers' HE aspirations and experiences in the labour market.

The research will compensate for the insufficiency of research on HE expansion and student-worker experiences in emerging economies. Turkey's last two decades are marked by a first populist period in which marketization and expansion of public goods coexisted (Yoruk, 2022), with HE being a prominent one. This was followed by an authoritarian turn emanating from an accumulation crisis and growing discontent (Altinors & Akcay, 2022). The latter led to the devaluation that caused Turkey to have the highest inflation rates in housing and food among OECD countries (OECD, 2022), items most relevant to student livelihood. The country hence provides an excellent case to study the impact of policy changes on HE expansion and student employment.

The research involves multi-sited ethnography in two cities to factor in differences in regional development: a) Istanbul, which has the highest student population, cost of living and the variety of industries with student jobs b) Antalya, which hosts universities founded upon demands of regional development, subsists on tourism and agriculture, and has one of the highest housing prices. It will deploy an interactive method, with ethnographic observations followed by in-depth interviews with student-workers.

References

Altinors, G. & Akçay, U. (2022) Authoritarian neoliberalism, crisis, and consolidation: the political economy of regime change in Turkey, Globalizations, 19:7, 1029-1053, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2021.2025290
Polat, S. (2017). The Expansion of Higher Education in Turkey: Access, Equality and Regional Returns to Education, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 43: 1-14.
Tekerek, T. (2023). Tasra Universiteleri: Ak Parti'nin Arka KampUsU. Istanbul: Iletisim.
Tomlinson, M. (2017). Introduction: Graduate Employability in Context: Charting a Complex, Contested and Multi-Faceted Policy and Research Field. (In) M. Tomlinson & L. Holmes (Eds), Graduate Employability in Context: Theory, Research and Debate, Pagrave Macmillan.
Yoruk, E. (2022). The Politics of Welfare in Turkey. In G. M. Tezcur (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics. Oxford University Press.