Gifts as gains? The impact of volunteering on young people’s educational and occupational attainment in Australia

Volunteering is perceived as benefiting youth by facilitating university entry and access to better employment. However, little empirical evidence exists to show whether such perceptions are justified. Therefore, this article presents data on volunteering and attainment from a representative sample of Australians who were born around 1990 and participated in the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth between 2006 and 2016. Supplementing results of two-level hierarchical models involving person-year data with insights from several in-depth interviews, we argue that Bourdieu’s theory of social practice is a fruitful framework for understanding how volunteering affects university participation and occupational status of young people. Volunteering provides gains, but they are not large enough to view it as an instrumental means which young people use to advance their educational and employment prospects. Rather, volunteering can be considered as a form of cultural capital which is beneficial but enacted for reasons other than extrinsic rewards.