Crossing a social demarcation line: Students experience friction in the transformed Swedish higher education system

ABSTRACT

One consequence of the widened participation in higher education (HE) is that the social demarcation line that once existed at the entrance to HE has moved inside the HE system. This study investigates how students experience social friction when demarcation lines are crossed and how such friction develops over time. This was achieved by repeated interviews with the same 10 HE students during their time at university. The study deploys habitus and hysteresis to explain how social dispositions from social origins are challenged but able to change when they are exposed to unfamiliar social situations. The study reveals how social friction in relation to both social background and to the HE system, progresses in terms of either fading or amplifying. These findings are concluded in a model that offers a systematic way of investigating how students experience HE over time in relation to social background.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• higher education
• hysteresis
• longitudinal approach

Setting the scene

The global expansion of higher education (HE) has been a significant social transformation process in the post-war era (Shavit et al., 2007). Trow, already in 1970, argued that HE, once considered a privilege, had ‘become a right transformed into something very near to obligation for growing numbers of young men and women’ (p. 3–4). Today, on the one hand, the expansion and subsequent widened participation indicates that the transformation has been a process of social equalisation. Today’s HE generation is characterised by social heterogeneity almost to a level in which ‘[t]here is no ‘“typical” student anymore’ (Thompson, 2017, p. 190). On the other hand, research reveal that ‘young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to go to university than their richer peers, less likely to attend the highest status institutions, less likely to graduate, and less likely to achieve the highest degree classifications’ (Bathmaker, 2021, p. 76). Despite widened participation in HE, the academic system still appears to be permeated by the same class-related obstacles with which working-class children always seem to have struggled (e.g. Bathmaker et al., 2016; Reay, 2017). Social demarcation lines that once marked the border between the outside and the inside of the HE system has moved inside the system. This have turned the crucial question from whether to study or not, to a question of what to study and where to study (Crozier et al., 2008; Grodsky & Riegle-Crumb, 2010; Reay et al., 2005; Thomsen, 2012).

But on the local level, these lines are not distinct. Single study programmes can be socially heterogenic in terms of enrolled students and most Swedish universities accommodates students from a diversity of social backgrounds. First-generation students from the working-class sit next to middle-class students in the classroom. They interact with each other, follow the same courses, take the same examinations, and aspire for the same degrees. On this level, social demarcations lines are diffuse, floating and not easy to detect.

In this unclear part of the HE system, the risk of navigating to HE positions that are incongruent with the individual social disposition increases. A body of research has shown how such situations produce socially propelled friction and conflict in relation to both the field of HE (e.g. Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bradley, 2017; Hordósy et al., 2018; Lehmann, 2007; Patiniotis & Holdsworth, 2005; Reay, 2017) and in relation to the social origins of the student (e.g. Henderson, 2020; Lehmann, 2013).

Despite this, contemporary research is underdeveloped in terms of systematic views on how such friction develops over time. The longitudinal approach used by Bathmaker et al. (2016) is an important exception. Drawing on longitudinal data collected at two different universities in the UK, this study ‘explores whether HE was a vehicle for social mobility or a mechanism for reproducing the existing structures of inequalities’ (p. 157). By interviewing students from different social backgrounds, the study uncovers how students handle situations from HE contexts characterised by significant social inequalities and, at the same time, manage the social life connected to the social origin. The study raises important questions about how students deal with HE choices that are incongruent with their social disposition and somehow manage to reproduce already existing social inequalities. Socially propelled friction is clearly present in the material but is not systematically presented.

This study analyses how HE students in a local Swedish HE context experience friction that is produced when a social demarcation line is crossed. A special interest is directed towards how such friction develops when students accumulate experiences from the Swedish HE system. This article explicitly addresses the following question: What social friction do students experience in a local Swedish HE context and how does this friction develop during their HE studies?

Social demarcation lines inside the Swedish HE System

The Swedish case is of special interest since the HE-system is relatively equal, without tuition fees combined with a generous student-loan system. At the same time the social demarcation lines of what to study and where to study are as present as they are in more hierarchised HE-system. Social mechanisms that reproduce social inequality hasn’t been obliterated despite decades of political reforms.

A brief view of the first social demarcation line, what to study, shows that first-generation students are more often enrolled in professional study programmes such as teaching and nursing – often short programmes with pre-determined destinations in the labour market. Most of these programmes were incorporated in the academic system at a rather late stage (many of them in the Swedish higher education reform of 1977). For example, first-generation students represented more than 60% of newly admitted students in the pre-school teacher programme in 2019/20, and almost 50% of newly admitted nursing students (Swedish Higher Education Authority, 2020). However, students whose parents had a degree in HE was overrepresented in longer, more traditional and prestigious professional study programmes such as law (76.6%) and medicine (83.8%), as well as in general bachelor and master programmes (64.9%; Swedish Higher Education Authority, 2020).

The second social demarcation line, where to study, shows an overrepresentation of first-generation students in higher education institutions without well-established academic traditions, while students from academic backgrounds are overrepresented in old and prestigious universities. In Sweden, this means that first-generation students are more common in regional university colleges (e.g. 44.8% of newly admitted students at Dalarna University, 2019/2020) and in ‘new’, post-99 universities (e.g. Malmö University: 46.7%) and are less common at the old and prestigious Swedish universities (Lund: 28.7% and Uppsala: 32.7%; Swedish Higher Education Authority, 2020).

Expanded, but differentiated familiarity with HE

Today, a significant number of students who leave upper secondary school have a personal relationship to someone involved in HE. Apart from parents, this could be a neighbour, friend, relative, older sibling, but also in the form of encouragement from teachers and counsellors in school. The social distance to HE has been notably reduced in social groups in which it used to be significant – a situation that is widespread and not unique to the Swedish HE system.

Despite this, previous research has demonstrated how first-generation and working-class students experience how their social backgrounds complicate their existence in HE in relation to their middle-class peers. For the latter, HE appears to be an expected, almost taken- for-granted, unconscious and natural part of individual biography (Ball et al., 2002; Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bowl, 2001; Carlhed, 2016; Grodsky & Riegle-Crumb, 2010). Early adulthood includes HE as a kind of trajectorial ‘rite of passage in the transition to adult life’ (Bathmaker et al., 2016, p. 145) in which parents do not hesitate to interfere and guide their children to educational pathways that minimise the risk of downward social mobility (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bradley, 2017). If they choose in accordance with their social origins, socially propelled friction is avoided and they will ‘find social life in college to be largely unsurprising’ (Jack, 2019, p. 29).

Non-traditional students lack such experiences. A wealth of international research shows how these students instead experience difficulties and discomfort in their encounters with the academic system (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Lehmann, 2009a; Meuleman et al., 2015; Reay et al., 2010, 2005; Ulriksen et al., 2017), encounters that more often ‘are internalised as a failure of the self rather than a failure of the system’ (Reay, 2018, p. 530). Academia is experienced as a social terra incognita with an almost unobtainable ‘language’ (Mackay & Devlin, 2015), a peculiar academic ‘discourse’ (Morrison, 2010) incorporated into a ‘middle-class world’ (Crozier et al., 2008) or ‘middle-class culture’ (Lehmann, 2009b) and ‘looks, feels, and functions like nothing they have experienced before’ (Jack, 2019, p. 11). These experiences make their presence in academia more fragile and contribute to them being overrepresented among drop-out students (Lehmann, 2007, 2012). Bradley (2017) argues that ‘[W]orking-class students enter HE without a map to find their way through.’ (p. 41) and that ‘[t]ravelling without maps is not easy and may even be dangerous’ (p. 42).

The fact that HE is much more difficult and riskier for non-traditional students contributes to how their academic choices and experiences are structured. Lehmann (2009b) has shown how working-class students enter university with a vocational value-for-money virtue that is different from the rite of passage associated with their middle-class peers. Working-class students …

[A]pproach university with an ethos of vocational education: the relatively high and uncertain investment in their university education makes these students more likely to insist on learning useful skills, becoming credentialed, gaining an advantage in the labor market, and getting their money’s worth. (p. 146)

Similar observations have been made in different Scandinavian contexts in which questions about the practical use of the learned content occur more often among non-traditional students (Thomsen, 2012; Ulriksen et al., 2017). This preference structure more cautious HE aspirations and choices. HE is an investment that requires a secure and guaranteed return in advance. Semi-professional study programmes are often considered such a ‘safe’ choice.

A theoretical framework: habitus

To understand how social dispositions of the individual encounter (un)familiar social fields such as HE, habitus, a centrepiece in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, is applied. The concept draws on the assumption that individual preferences must be understood as conditioned by social constraints incorporated in the individual. The incorporation process takes place in the social milieu in which individuals are raised and provides them with a set of social dispositions. These social dispositions shape how individuals develop ‘a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’ (Bourdieu, 1977[1972]), pp. 93–94) which ‘encompasses posture, demeanour, outlook, expectations and tastes.’ (Sweetman, 2003, p. 532).

Habitus is durable, resistant, and sluggish, keeping the familiar close and the non-familiar at a distance. Acting in familiar social settings is easy. The challenge is acting in more disparate social fields. Bourdieu claims that ‘practices are always liable to incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fitted.’ (Bourdieu, 1977[1972], p. 78). This is when habitus clash (Lehmann, 2007; 2012) or become ‘dislocated’ (Baxter & Britton, 2001; Lehmann, 2009b; Lehmann, 2012), ‘cleaved’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999[1993]; Friedman, 2015), or ‘splintered’ (Wacquant, 2016). Other studies describe it as individuals undergoing ‘out of habitus experiences’ (Reay et al., 2009) or suffering from a ‘disrupted habitus’ (Lehmann, 2012) or ‘cultural homelessness’ (Friedman, 2014). Ingram (2011) describes it as a ‘habitus tug’ when students ‘[e]xperience life simultaneously in juxtaposing fields’ (p. 293).

Abrahams and Ingram (2013) observed what they call a chameleon habitus in working-class students who were able to ‘switch between the two fields’ by ‘modifying their speech, appearance and behaviour’ (p. 11). However, this ability to perform in two different fields is not necessarily a positive solution to overcoming habitus incongruence. Instead, it ‘must be recognised that this is also a profoundly painful place to be in both emotionally and psychologically’ (p. 11), a state that Friedman (2014) describe as ‘the hidden costs of mobility’ (p. 358).

The fish in water analogy, introduced by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p. 127), is probably the most common way of conceptualising habitus. In this article, friction in HE relates to what previous research has described as being a ‘fish out of water’ (e.g. Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bradley, 2017; Meuleman et al., 2015; Reay et al., 2009). The fish out of water must be contrasted with the ‘fish in water’, which describes a social situation in which the individual, without conscious intentions, knows how to play the field-specific social game. Bradley (2017) clarifies the analogy by saying that ‘A fish in its natural element is at home, swimming and breathing as required effortlessly, without being aware of it, while the fish out of its element struggles to survive’ (p. 35). In this context, crossing a social demarcation line can be likened to a fish that leaves the water.

Hysteresis

Bourdieu argues that disruptions of habitus can be explained in terms of a structural lag in how the individual adapts to unfamiliar social fields. He uses hysteresis, a concept borrowed from physics, when explaining how social dispositions come into conflict in encounters with new social positions and fields (Bourdieu, 1977[1972]; 2000[1997]; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In physics, hysteresis describes how an object continues to move in a certain direction even though the power source has been shut off or reversed. Hysteresis lasts for a period of time, then subsides and finally disappears. Translated into sociology, Bourdieu (1977[1972]) states that hysteresis is one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them’ (p. 83) or as …

/ … / an inertia (or hysteresis) of habitus which have a spontaneous tendency (based in biology) to perpetuate structures corresponding to their conditions of production. As a result, it can happen that / … / dispositions are out of line with the field and with the ‘collective expectations’ which are constitutive of its normality. (Bourdieu, 2000[1997], p. 160).

Bourdieu (2020[2015]) further clarifies his argument by claiming that:

The social world seems self-evident. And yet, in the ‘disorientation’ that we feel on entering a foreign society, the gap between our incorporated structures and the new objectified structures provokes a feeling of incomprehension, which, being intolerable, is immediately dissolved by reinterpreting the objectified structures in terms of our incorporated structures (which is where misunderstandings arise). (p. 38)

In this context, the use of hysteresis includes two major contributions to develop an understanding of how friction related to social background in higher education progresses. First, hysteresis contributes to a further theoretical understanding of the (re)flexibility and changing potential of habitus (cf., Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Jin & Ball, 2020; Sweetman, 2003), but without neglecting the types of individual sacrifices and conflicts that accompany such changes.

Second, hysteresis offers methodological implications of how habitus can operate in research that studies progress in which habitus incongruence exists. The type of temporality that is integrated into hysteresis implies the need to investigate transitions into unfamiliar social fields over time (cf., Author, ; Bathmaker et al., 2016; Bourdieu, 2010[1984]). Just like the definition of hysteresis used in physics, the power of hysteresis is not permanent – it is fading out. Encounters with unfamiliar social fields such as HE is changing over time and require a longitudinal study design that take this into account.

Methodology and data

To capture the temporality and changing nature of hysteresis-related friction, this study was designed as a longitudinal panel study in which the same 10 students were interviewed on three different occasions during their time in HE. One student declined further participation after the first interview. Thus, a total of 28 semi-structured interviews with an interval of five years between the first and last interview were conducted. The interviewed students were selected from a group of 62 newly admitted students to the programme. Students with weak, modest, and strong acquired educational resources (grades and/or results on SweSAT) were selected (see Appendix 1) to investigate whether acquired educational resources could contribute to reinforcing or moderating possible social friction related to HE.

The first interview mainly focused on educational experiences prior to higher education while the second and third interview included experiences of higher education to date. The focus of the last interview was future aspirations but was also an opportunity to look back and ‘evaluate’ experiences from HE. By interviewing students repeatedly, processes such as changing social relationships ambitions and how to organise everyday life during education could be uncovered (Saldaña, 2001; Stuber, 2011).

The empirical data has been sorted with guidance from the theoretical concepts of habitus and hysteresis, which makes it more of ‘a “theoretical thematic analysis” / … / driven by the researcher’s theoretical or analytic interest in the area’ (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 84). Frictions have mainly been operationalised in expressed experiences of comfort and discomfort. The coding procedure focused on how the interviewed students expressed comfort and discomfort in relation to experiences of being a HE-student. These experiences were thematically categorised in what the students experienced comfort/discomfort in relation to, when, during the study programme, these experiences were made and who, in terms of social background, that experienced it.

From previous research, different selection strategies for capturing students affected by social incongruence were used. Both Reay et al. (2009) and Jack (2019) chose to study experiences of higher education of working-class students in elite academic institutions, a situation in which incongruence can be expected to be extensive. However, in the Paired Peers project, Bathmaker et al. (2016) used a sample that included both working-class and middle-class students admitted to two different universities located in the same city but with different positions in the social hierarchy of UK universities.

In this study, the interviewed students were admitted to the same study programme at the same university. Both university and programme are characterised by social heterogeneity. Almost 62% of the newly admitted students to the programme and just over 60% of the newly admitted students at the university had some inherited academic resources (parents with experience from HE). The programme is long (4.5 years) and contain extensive academic traditions – the sort of traditions that usually attract students from the educated middle-class. However, it is a so-called semi-professional study programme (cf., Börjesson et al., 2014), leading to a vocation that lacks the same social prestige and is not as selective as classical professional study programmes such as medicine and law.

The university (fictitious name: University of Middletown), at which the study was conducted, belongs to the post-99 universities. It lacks academic traditions and social prestige that distinguish the old universities. On the other hand, its research activities and social status are higher than university colleges.

Social friction in HE

Entering HE

Some students entered HE without friction. Pernilla, a student born and raised close to Middletown with a mother and older sister with experiences from HE and a father without such experiences, emphasised the importance of familiarity in her HE choices. With good grades from upper secondary school, it was obvious that she would continue to university. In the first interview she motivated her choices close to the Bourdieusian fish-in-water-analogy.

I kind of know where things are here. I’ve been here before. This is a safe place for me. / … / I know that many people think that it’s exciting to go to a new place, but I don’t really see it that way. I felt like, why move to X [exemplified by another post-99-university] when I can just as easily study here? Then I’m close to home.

Pernilla

Johan, a first-generation and working-class student with good grades from upper secondary school, described his entrance into university as ‘a sort of homecoming’, a statement that indicated his complex relationship with his social origin. He described himself as motivated in school and far too different to fit into the general youth culture that dominated the small town in which he grew up.

It was just cars, drinking beer and stuff. Young people drove cars and mopeds, sniffed glue and drank beer. / … / Many of them were very conservative, disliked immigrants and I didn’t agree with them and their views. There were many controversies and conflicts.

Johan

University became like a safe haven where he could avoid friction related to his social origin and somehow was prepared and equipped to handle friction related to HE. The fact that he felt comfortable in school probably helped him in the transition to HE and in the habitus transformation that helped him neutralise the disruptive effects of hysteresis. Despite commuting distance between Middletown and home, he only visited his family back home occasionally.

Siri, also a student with good grades from upper secondary school, experienced friction in relation to her social origins. Unlike Johan, she came from a highly educated family with academic traditions for generations. Her choice of Middletown University and the HE programme produced friction in relation to her ambitious and worried parents. The fact that neither the university nor the programme were considered good enough caused friction. Her parents chose to intervene. They drove almost 300 kilometres to the university, sat down with their daughter and had a ‘chat’ about her future.

So, I talked to my dear mother, and she came up with the idea ‘You’ve not thought about trying to study further in different ways?’ – and I had thought about that. [Siri describe in detail an idea for a further thesis]. It would have been interesting to conduct further research after I had graduation.

Siri

This is also what she eventually did. However, she did not transfer to the same prestigious university at which her parents and older brother had studied. Her parent’s intervention possibly ‘saved’ her from downward social mobility but was not enough to keep her away from Middletown University.

Neither Angelica nor Mikaela, two first-generation working-class students with moderate grades from upper secondary school, initially experienced friction in relation to their social origins. Instead, they found it hard to understand how to fit into the new life in academia and how to ‘demystify’ academia or, in this context, how to cross the social demarcation line. Angelica described how she failed in her first examination even though …

… while I was studying it was not that difficult. Then I received the actual test questions, and they were more difficult than I’d imagined. A more academic answer was required and when you sit there under pressure you don’t really get the academic out of yourself. So, I sat there and thought ‘I can’t write it like that’ and I wouldn’t dare use a more advanced language.

Angelica

The lack of knowledge of how to perform academically, indicate how the ability to decode the academic language is crucial to manage university studies. Bourdieu, (1991[1982]) claims that in every social field, such as the academic field, ‘the language is a code / … / in the sense of a system of norms regulating linguistic practices.’ (p. 45). If the student can’t decode the academic language, crucial obstacles to perform academically, arise. Mikaela also had difficulties when trying to decode how to organise her academic studies.

This business about reading academic literature. There’s not one single sentence that is unnecessary in these books. You have to absorb and learn everything. And then you’re expected to read a whole book that’s like that. You sometimes want to cry when you try. And then you’re supposed to read five other books in the same week. That’s when you feel that it’s a bit too much.

Mikaela

None of the students initially moved to campus, they commuted from their rural family homes, kept their part-time jobs and none of them used the Swedish student loan system. The effects of hysteresis explain their failure to perform university studies but also their limited commitment. As working-class students, they were cautious when they made decisions about social and economic investments associated with HE, decisions that delayed their integration as university students and adversely affected their study results.

Patiniotis and Holdsworth (2005) argue that participation in HE can involve an identity risk for non-traditional students, stating that ‘Living at home and maintaining ties with the local community is a way of minimising this risk.’ (p. 92) while Meuleman et al. (2015) observed that students who found no social support in the new social field ‘expressed feelings of loneliness and isolation’ (p. 514). By choosing not to move to campus, the students delayed their integration process and ‘the possibility for generating social resources that may help them navigate college life’ (Stuber, 2011, p. 34).

In comparison to Johan, who had a similar social background to Angelica and Mikaela, a change of identity was quite a relief and something he wanted, actively sought and was prepared for. The differences between students with objectively similar social background draws attention to the need not to neglect how students with similar social backgrounds approach HE in different ways and with different conditions and, ultimately, with different results (Jack, 2019). Johan received further help in his social transition by hooking up with a girlfriend from Middletown from an academic background, with whom he bought an apartment and established his new life. Having a significant social relationship with someone on the ‘inside’ helped to overcome hysteresis was something that Bourdieu experienced himself (Bourdieu, 2007[2004]). It has been described as ‘a critical ingredient in the formation of new student identity’ (Scanlon et al., 2007, p. 237) and a strategy to successfully cross the social demarcation line (cf., Romito, 2022).

Angelica and Mikaela, on the other hand, could not distance themselves from the social power of their social origins. They lacked sufficient preparation (good grades), commitment and a significant ‘insider’ who could help them overcome friction and obstacles on their way to becoming integrated university students. However, at least initially, they were able to maintain their original social life, while Johan voluntarily sacrificed close relationships with his family in his ambition to be integrated into the social life as a student. Lehmann (2013) argues that fully integrated students ‘not only spoke about gaining new knowledge, but also about growing personally, changing their outlooks of life, growing their repertoire of cultural capital, and developing new dispositions and tastes about a range of issues’ (p. 11).

Friction in progress

Just like hysteresis, the friction related to academia, experienced by Angelica and Mikaela, faded. Close to what Clayton et al. (2009) has described as initial ‘resistance of integration’ both working-class students were ‘open to changing conceptions of the self and of others’ (p. 170). This produced another type of friction. Both eventually moved to Middletown and reduced their social commitment to their social origin while building a new social life with academic studies in the centre. They then experienced friction in relation to their social origins instead. Mikaela was annoyed that her parents were unaware and had no knowledge of the academic system, saying that …

… they don’t really know that anyone can apply to a university. They probably think it’s rather “high” and unattainable.

Mikaela

Angelica experienced friction and sometimes full-blown conflict when her parents had no faith in her academic ability and her ambition to be something else than a factory worker.

My dad is determined that I’ll end up in a factory anyway. Every time I come home, he asks ‘So are you done soon?’. He thinks I’m just studying. He then says that there are so many people at his workplace who completed higher education but who are still stuck in the factory. That there is security there. ‘You might end up in the factory anyway,’ he says.

Angelica

Even if both still had problems in performing good results in HE, new experiences from their life as university students produced another type of friction with their social origins as counterparts. They kind of balanced on the social demarcation line or rather operated in a no-man-land surrounded by social friction. The students were put in a situation in which they ‘need to negotiate a precarious balance between old and new social worlds’ (Lehmann, 2013, p. 2).

For Siri, the hysteresis did not seem to fade away. She somehow operated in a field in which she had a habitus that was not flexible enough to fully fit in. Instead, she stayed but distanced herself from the context. This strategy was illustrated by how she repeatedly criticised the university for having ‘wrong’ or ‘corny’ academic traditions, her student peers for not being ambitious enough and the study programme for not being scientific enough. But she remained as something Reay (2018) label as an ‘outsider on the inside’ (p. 532). Neither friction nor the intervention from her parents were strong enough to completely drag her away from the university and the programme. Siri’s decision to stay despite the friction was strategic in relation to what she was planning to do after graduation. Her degree was her entrance ticket to more desirable positions inside the HE. ‘This is something I need in my CV’ she said in the final interview and referred to it as being her plan throughout the programme. Coming from an academic family she had cultural capital enough to value the exchange value of the credentials she accumulated from the programme.

Similar strategies could be found among other students from an academic background but with the difference that the ‘discovery’ of a possible continuation after graduation was revealed later and caused friction. When new HE experiences were accumulated, these students seemed to use the new experiences to distance themselves from the social semi-profession position the exam from the study programme enable. The final destination after graduation was well-known and pre-destinated throughout the entire programme and was an important reason for choosing the programme in the first place. Experiences from the programme seem to have been an eye opener to other, more attractive options. Pernilla, the student who behaved like a fish in water throughout virtually the entire programme, suddenly could not cope with the pre-determined destination once she had discovered that there were alternative options and pathways.

Maybe I should do a doctorate instead. I’m finishing this programme. It’s stupid to drop out from a programme and not end up with a degree. / … / I’m doing very well at university. This definitely comes into play. I’m doing very well in the academic world. That’s how it is.

Pernilla

She wasn’t alone. Experiences from the last year seem to produce friction for students who have not previously experienced friction, either towards their social origins or towards their life as a university student. The former fish in water suddenly faced a position where she could not remain in the water. Fredrik, a student with similar social origins as Pernilla, stated:

This is not the professional position I must have. Just because I’ve completed this programme, I’m not locked into working with this forever. I actually have some kind of choice to do something I really want to do.

Fredrik

A while after the final interview, Fredrik, in an e-mail, stated that ‘it is currently out of the question that I will work as X [the semi-profession in which he had been trained]’. Instead, his exam qualified him for a teaching position at the university. Accumulated experiences made the students cross new social demarcation lines that caused new friction.

Similar opportunities also appeared for the working-class students but was not enough for them to cross the demarcation line and generate friction in relation to the final and pre-given destination in the labour market. High-achieving, working-class students like Johan were eager to leave the life as a university student and enter the labour market. During his final interview, Johan stated that he has …

… been short of cash for so many years now. I want to work. I want to have a monthly salary. This is why I have educated myself. My God, now it’s time to reap the benefits.

Johan

Despite the smooth journey on the programme on which students like Johan had enrolled, they were relieved when they eventually could leave university with a degree that gave them opportunities that their parents never had. They seem to have emerged richer in experience, armed with both symbolic and cultural capital that qualified them to positions that their parents could only dream of. The price they paid was the enhanced social distance that Bourdieu et al., 1999[1993]) discussed in terms of a break from the social succession of the family. To illustrate this point, Bourdieu describes the intergenerational relationship from the parent perspective:

At one and the same time he [the father] says: be like me, act like me, but be different, go away. / … / He both wishes and fears that his son will become an alter ego, just as he fears and wishes that his son will become other, an ”alter.” (p. 510)

For other students, friction could not be eliminated, and alternative strategies could not be identified. They eventually dropped out of the programme and, in some cases, also from university. Alexej, a working-class student, expressed his fears about being tempted by aspects of the life his parents lived and that this temptation would drive him away from the university.

If I start working now, there’s a great risk that I will get stuck. Because if I get stuck in a job but get paid well, you feel: Now I have a decent salary. Now is not the time to study.

Alexej

Just a short time after the interview he dropped out, started working for ‘a decent salary’ and did not return. The hysteresis appeared to be too powerful and ruined his opportunities within the HE system. Using hysteresis, a student dropping out can be interpreted as a consequence of perceived temptations and opportunities to establish a life of characterised by decent level of social and financial security. Instead, HE is a terra incognita in which dreams of a decent life was not obvious. HE is regarded an unsafe investment and was a demarcation line he tried, but could not cross.

Conclusive discussion

Structured by two dimensions of friction, Figure 1 illustrates a model of different positions in which students can appear when studying at university. Their initial position are structured by habitus and generate different forms of friction understood as hysteresis. Also, movements between positions in the model illustrate the fading but also changing characteristics of hysteresis from one version of habitus to another, a process initiated when cultural capital are collected from a ‘new’ social field, in this case, academia and university life in a broad sense. Every position is illustrated by a dramatic metaphor that is further developed. The model is only based on a small number of observations and can probably be further developed and refined.

Figure 1. Friction experienced during the life as an HE student.

Crozier et al.’s (2008) argument that ‘/ … / studying is challenging, angst-ridden work, but for some it is made easier than for others.’ (p. 176) is highly accurate in this study. For some students, attending university appears to be, at least initially, like acting like a fish in water. They do not experience friction in relation to their new life as a university student and can slip between home and HE without friction. No social demarcations lines need to be crossed. Academic life is not an unknown aspect of the families of such students. Particularly middle-class students seem to ‘have learned dispositions to fit the university context and generate further habitus through social interactions’ (Crozier et al., 2008, p. 175). Students without such dispositions need help to accumulate proper cultural capital to handle life in academia. This study shows that this demand social sacrifices to ensure harmony in HE.

Friction in relation to social origins occurs when university life, in some cases that particular university life (university and study programme), instead is an unknown entity for the families of the students. Friction in relation to social origins can be suppressed by remaining at a distance from the original family while fully embracing university life. This voluntary exile is facilitated when students, to some extent, are prepared for the transition to HE. Lehmann (2012) believes that ‘students who entered university committed had probably encountered periods of habitus transformation in high school that prepared them for university’ (p. 542). Using the concept of Grodsky and Riegle-Crumb (2010), a college-going habitus develops before going to college. Such a habitus transformation contributes to neutralising hysteresis but does not come without social sacrifices.

Friction in relation to both social origins and academia occurs when no such preparation takes place and when significants such as parents disapprove or do not have sufficient knowledge of HE. In such circumstances, students must handle a two-front battle or similar to what Bourdieu (1996[1989]) describe as a ‘double isolation’ (p. 107) or doing the work of a ‘double agent’ (Friedman, 2014, pp. 360–361). Bathmaker (2021) argues that this position in between two social fields ‘is not simply about the capacity to engage with academic study, but about the ways in which class is implicit in the everyday social processes and interactions of university life’ (p. 84). In such cases, friction in relation to academia can theoretically be understood as the outcome of such lingering social power sources interpreted as hysteresis. Just like in physics, hysteresis fades away when students gain academic experience that equips them with that specific cultural capital that give them resources to cross the social demarcation line, establish themselves in a position of voluntary exile and keep possible friction away. The two-front battle position was observed when the chosen study programme and university was at risk of both upward and downward social mobility.

However, sometimes hysteresis does not fade. The grip from the social origin is too strong, which leaves the student with two different options. First, they can choose to drop out and return to their original social position and the class-related temptations offered there. Second, get guidance from social significants from the social origin (which itself eliminates friction) to identify strategies that deceive the system, in this case, the intention of taking a degree without intending to use the degree for its publicly intended purpose. Such a strategy allows them to operate behind enemy lines. This position requires social capital, embodied as permanent access to significants with knowledge and experience from HE system that are able to help the student to formulate such strategies. They seem to belong, but they act like they don’t belong. Neither of these options force the student to cross the social demarcation line.

The study also shows how resources could be accumulated by the students themselves and, in combination with inherited cultural capital, mobilise unexpected action. A life in academia expands both the knowledge of, and the scope for, action and choices within the academic system. New and more attractive alternatives within the academic system were identified and reconsidered made HE choices and initiated new ones. The students appeared to emerge from a position they had previously handled like a fish in water and suddenly found themselves behind enemy lines. They had activated their new, accumulated capital to cross a new social demarcation line – this generated new type of friction, though.

For working-class students, the degree and the labour market for which they have forfeited social relations and connections in their social environment of origin, loomed. Using HE as a driving force the social transition from one social segment to the next was completed. No magic, just hard work accompanied by lingering social friction and sacrifice.

Biographical note

Magnus Persson holds a position as senior lecturer in sociology at the Department of social studies at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. His research is mainly in the field of sociology of education and sociology of professions.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or not-financial competing interest to report.

Appendix

Table

Name^a	Gender	Inherited educational resources	Acquired educational resources
Alexej^b	Male	Weak	Weak
Angelica^b	Female	Weak	Moderate
Erik	Male	Moderate	Weak
Fredrik^b	Male	Moderate	Moderate
Johan^b	Male	Weak	Strong
Louise^b	Female	Weak	Strong
Mikaela^b	Female	Weak	Weak
Ola	Male	Strong	Strong
Pernilla^b	Female	Moderate	Strong
Siri^b	Female	Strong	Strong

^aNames are fictitious

^bAppears in the article