How working-class students choose higher education. The role of family, social networks and the institutional habitus of secondary schools

ABSTRACT

Based on a qualitative study of school-to-university transition focused on working-class first-generation university students, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it illustrates the multiple intertwining dimensions of the process of moving from school to university within an ‘open-door’ admission policy context such as the Italian one. Second, it emphasizes the role of students’ social networks and secondary school institutional habitus in differentiating how working-class students experience university decision-making. Using a Bourdieusian framework, this paper show that family habitus and cultural capital influence the decision to transition to university. However, the paper also shows that these influences are mediated by schools’ institutions according to their positions within the Italian tracking structure. In this respect, it is argued that institutional habitus constitutes a relevant heuristic to provide deeper understanding of barriers encountered by working-class students to access to university and to acknowledge the existence of important dimensions of differentiation among these students.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• first-generation students
• educational decisions
• institutional habitus
• Bourdieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A recent quantitative test has pointed out that RAT has limited explanatory power in accounting for social inequalities in access to university while subjective perceptions about university costs and future returns play a major role (Barone et al., 2018).

2. University fees range today from almost nil to 2,000 euro per year, based on family income.

3. These degrees do not have anything peculiar in terms of admission policies. As with most bachelors’ degrees, students are free to enrol without selective examinations.

4. Not secondarily, the choice of focusing specifically on two degrees is related to the overall scope of the research project and, thus, to the need of providing an in-depth contextualization of their university experiences. An issue that is beyond the objectives of this paper and that we discuss in other contributions (Romito, 2021; Romito et al., 2020).

5. Due to space limitations, relationships between gender and immigration background on one hand, and university decision-making on the other, will not be analysed. Although this is a limitation of this paper, we have chosen to prioritize an in-depth description of the influence of family habitus and secondary school institutional habitus in this paper. As it has been an important part of the research project, we discuss the role played out by the immigration background and its intersection with the gender and social class dimension elsewhere (Romito, 2021)

6. The interviews allow us to highlight a range of subtle differences among these types of schools, particularly regarding teachers’ practices. However, providing an understanding of these intra-track differences would have needed a different research design and would have gone beyond the objectives of this study.