Making Worth, Making Sense of the Sacrifice: Examining the Career Education Trajectories of Economically Marginalized, First-Generation Latina Graduates

Alexia Fernanda Pineda Soto

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative study was to assess the ways current higher education approaches to career education, counseling, and preparation models served, or disserved, economically marginalized first-generation Latinas (EMFGL) and their career identities. In centering EMFGL-identifying college graduates, this study used interviews to glean an understanding of what the EMFGL career education experience was like and how forms of career preparation in college equipped, or unequipped, students’ career pathways. Driven to assess how higher education institutions can come to eradicate the generalization of their career counseling and education practices and ideologies, this work further uncovers how EMFGL graduates use their career counseling and education realities as a faculty—a sensibility—to (a) critique and question the dominant forms and depictions of career success operating under Western and capitalistic paradigms and (b) to (re)define the spaces that constrain, define, and drive EMFGL steps beyond the collegiate space.

Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctorate in Education
Awarding Institution
  • Loyola Marymount University
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Stephenson, Rebecca, Dissertation Chair
  • Lapayese, Yvette, Committee Member
StatePublished - Apr 1 2023
Externally publishedYes

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