Hard Lessons for Lifelong Learners? Age and Experience in the Graduate Labour Market

The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those over the age of 30 had considerably more difficulty than younger graduates in accessing the career opportunities for which their education had equipped them. Is this still the case for more recent graduates? Drawing on a major qualitative and quantitative study of a class of graduates who completed their undergraduate degree courses in 1995, this paper explores early career development and employment outcomes according to age at graduation. Although we find considerable diversity among all age groups, mature graduates were more likely than their younger peers to experience difficulty in accessing appropriate employment, had a lower rate of earnings growth and expressed higher levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.     

Electronic journals: user realities — the truth about content usage among the STM community

Kate Worlock, a consultant for research and consultancy organization Electronic Publishing Services, reports on a study conducted for the Ingenta Institute on how UK users access, use, and pay for electronic articles from scientific journals. The findings reveal a research community increasingly conditioned to expecting content as soon as it is available for dissemination rather than waiting for the delivery of the physical journal itself.     

Producing the German Civic Nation: Immigrant Patriotism in Berlin's World Cup Flag Fight

In order to untangle the tension between the exclusionary prerogative of sovereignty and the universalizing philosophy of the nation-state under civic nationalism, this study examines the press coverage of a flag fight in an immigrant neighborhood of Berlin during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In the heavily mediatized struggle, German anti-fascists repeatedly damaged and stole a 22-meter-tall German flag belonging to a family of Lebanese extraction. The flag fight and the media's coverage of it demonstrated competing and overlapping definitions of citizenship, with the media and the flag owners promoting a civic form of nationalism. The case illuminates a national project to redefine German national identity and expand it beyond the boundaries of ethnic nationalism. At the same time, it reveals persistent anxieties about migrant spaces and their place in the nation.