**4. Third crossroads: subjective well-being of professionals**

On the basis that subjectivity is the process through which people "construct an image of themselves, of others and of the world in the context of their social experiences" ([34]: 16), and considering that this sphere is formed by their emotions, images, perceptions, desires, motivations and evaluations among other elements [3], and that each historical moment proposes or prescribes to individuals elements to fix their subjectivity, preserve it or transform it on account of a certain number of purposes, due to the relations of mastery of oneself, over oneself, or of selfknowledge, which produces a type of mentality congruent with the existing cultural conditions [35], it is possible to sustain the existence of a crossroads between the "structural de-qualification of qualifications" ([4]: 40), the subjective well-being of professionals, and the sense of existential insecurity among those who are training as professionals, expressed as fear of the future.

The de-qualification of degrees is considered structural, because it does not depend only on the quality and pertinence of higher education, and on the rigorousness with which professionals develop their work, but is rather fundamentally influenced by the impacts of the massification, fragmentation and segmentation of higher education on the social, cultural and economic "closures" of each profession in the territories in which they are developed. Social closure is "the union of the 'economic' closure in a competitive labor market and the 'cultural' closure of a group for the appropriation of legitimate knowledge: one and the other are the result of the professional strategy that the same actors use to achieve it" ([36]: 219). Thus, social closure refers to "the degree to which professional collectivities try to regulate, in their favor, market conditions by limiting access to it by a restricted group of potential competitors" ([36]: 53). Likewise, cultural closure corresponds to the "recognition of a legitimate acquired knowledge, without which professional practice would be impossible and which implies, therefore, a cultural closure of

certain professional groups to those who cannot certify the possession of such knowledge" ([36]: 219).

In the scenario in which higher education is currently developing in Latin America, university degrees have undergone processes of structural de-qualification, which, as has been pointed out, refers to the fact that the current cohorts of professionals seem to obtain, from the exercise of their professions, fewer prerogatives than those of the generations that preceded them. Although this phenomenon has multiple dimensions, one of its edges can be observed in the evolution of remuneration obtained by those who practice in Chile. This is especially so among some professions that have been more involved in direct attention to people in the context of COVID-19, such as those linked to direct social intervention, that is, face to face with the people who receive their work; where anthropology, psychology, sociology, social work, and risk prevention engineering; and professions in the field of health, such as nursing, medicine, and medical technology. The following **Figure 1** shows the evolution over the last five years of the average salaries obtained by this type of professionals.

Although Chile had shown economic and social stability until October 2019, when social protests began – and although these measurements were taken before COVID-19 affected employment – all these professions were already experiencing a gradual decline in their economic income, which reflects a dimension of their structural de-qualification. In the social sciences, this downward trend in professional income is compounded by the hybridity of the boundaries in the labor practice, in that, regardless of the type of degree obtained, these professionals share jurisdictions by performing equivalent tasks. Therefore, the cultural boundaries of anthropology, social or community psychology, sociology and social work are becoming increasingly blurred, tending toward interdisciplinarity, which, given the complexity of social issues, may be considered a strength in accordance with current trends in professional knowledge. However, this may also negatively affect the subjective well-being of those students who entered these careers with a different imaginary, closer to the traditional ethos of these professions, which corresponds to what is usually transmitted by the official media through which information

#### **Figure 1.**

*Source: Prepared by the authors based on data published by the Chilean Ministry of Education, year 2021.En: www.mifuturo.cl.*

#### *Crossroads of Higher Education in Troubled Times Facing the Future of Work and the Subjective… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99999*

concerning vocational orientation is disseminated. Furthermore, all these professions experience the processes of massification and fragmentation that characterize higher education in Latin America today. Indeed, segmentation is evidenced by the fact that medicine is the only one of these professions whose students come mostly from private paid secondary education, while the other careers include students coming from state-subsidized and family co-paying establishments. Meanwhile, those who graduate from public secondary schools study these professions in a smaller proportion, tending rather to continue studies in professional institutes or technical training centers.

Considering that, even in Latin America, the idea persists that obtaining a university degree entails a better position and social valuation with respect to nonprofessionals – and more favorable opportunities for labor insertion and progress, which is reinforced if we consider that, for example in Chile, the minimum monthly legal income for workers between 18 and 65 years of age is US\$ 427.53, which is well below the professional monthly income – then it could be argued that the structural de-qualification of qualifications may consist of a process of rearrangement of the socio-professional pyramid in each country toward social equality in fulfillment of this longing so widely nested in Latin American cultures. It could also mean a process of opening toward the democratization of knowledge, which may be reflected in the expansion of the social, cultural and economic closures of the professions, whose hybrid jurisdictions, and therefore the juxtaposition of professional tasks, has been demonstrated. However, given the transformations in the world of work, increasingly tending toward economic precariousness, and the competition between professionals in the same area, rather than with specific qualifications – which widens the range of applicants with more and more credentials, to the same job position, in addition to having to face the variables of gender and differentiated professional status – the structural disqualification of the professions may put higher education at a crossroads, since those who are being trained as professionals may experience a sense of insecurity, expressed as fear of the future, in the area of their subjective well-being as professionals.

The structural disqualification of the degrees may generate the feeling of an unfulfilled professional promise [37–39], to maintain what Bourdieu stated more than two decades ago in that professionals "deeply doubtful of their social identity, of their own image, by a school system and a social system that have paid them with vain promises, cannot restore their personal and social integrity in any other way, than by opposing to these verdicts a global rejection" ([4]: 7). This has become evident in the manifestations of social discontent that have taken place in different countries of the continent in recent years, in which the students who have opted for higher education, for a particular area, and for a specific profession, are faced with the publicly known idea in Latin America, regarding the structural disqualification of degrees; and therefore, the latent possibility of experiencing an unfulfilled professional promise. This is expressed in everyday life, in colloquial terms, with the label of "educated unemployed" or "cab driver with a university degree". This situation produces insecurity experienced as fear or anxiety about the future of work, which is assumed to be indefinite and uncontrollable, since the professional future is seen as a multidimensionality that cannot be interpreted through traditional explanatory models, where work is a requisite for social integration, a space for citizen participation, and a driver of material progress.

Subjective well-being consists of the assessment that a person makes regarding his/her own life, in terms of the preponderance of positive feelings, over the negative ones referred to his/her life satisfaction [40, 41], in which are interrelated its hedonic components (constituted by the most frequent feelings, emotions and moods of a person) with its cognitive components (which represent the perceived

discrepancy between aspirations and achievements, whose evaluative range goes from the feeling of personal fulfillment to that of failure or frustration) [42–44].

In the case of professional subjective well-being, this is experienced in a job that oscillates between the disciplinary paradigm and the performance paradigm. In the disciplinary paradigm, work is delimited by a system of rules, including the automatism of customs in a given work space, and contemplates control, rules, prohibitions, and orientations for action [45]. In the performance paradigm, "projects, initiatives and motivation replace prohibition, mandate and law" ([45]: 17) replace the negative idea of prohibition with the affirmative of "being able to do", being self-motivated and self-optimized with central professional skills. In both scenarios, professional subjective wellbeing is confronted with the structural disqualification of degrees, experienced by students as fear of future employment, becoming a crossroads for higher education, which opens up possibilities to develop new professional skills, or to resituate those that, given the current convulsive times, might have become obsolete.
