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This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white-collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities.

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A significant about of educational research has foregrounded the challenges international students face while living learning abroad. While “challenge centric” research has been productive for highlighting the needs of international students, it has tended to reify international students as a vulnerable group in need of intervention. This approach has often downplayed international students’ agency and has not fully moved beyond the boundaries of deficit thinking. This article discusses the implications of framing international students as a vulnerable group before offering some conceptual starting points that might orient future research in more productive directions. It suggests that foregrounding the agency of international students offers a promising mode of reanimating research, and briefly discusses the methodological, conceptual, and political implications of doing so.

This article critiques productivist and wage‐centric conceptualisations of labour by analysing the labouring practices of jobless degree holders in the Indian Himalayas. I draw on ethnographic material to illuminate how young men developed forms of unpaid labour that centred skills associated with their educational credentials. Educated youth were able to produce positive reputations through their labour and made sense of their activities as making a social contribution to others. Yet their labouring practices also affirmed dominant modes of masculinity and reinscribed patriarchal gender relations. While jobless degree holders were excluded from the kinds of jobs they desired, I argue that they were able to yield status and respect by embodying competencies that white collar jobs demanded. Situating jobless degree holders within productive relations creates scope for illuminating how they attempt to assert their productive capacities in the face of long‐term unemployment.