Transforming oneself: delving into the processes of habitus transformation in the higher education field

Abstract

In a context of universalization of Higher Education (HE) and fragmentation of educational trajectories, consolidating a process of educational and social mobility implies, for many students with non-traditional backgrounds, important identity conflicts. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with non-traditional working-class students enrolled in an HE institution in Barcelona (Spain), three major patterns of what we have called ‘habitus transformations’ have been identified: adaptation, substitution and dislocation or rupture. The results of this study suggest that the universalization of access to HE does not mechanically imply greater opportunities for educational success for non-traditional students. The contribution also introduces the subjective experience of being a non-traditional HE student and the emotional impacts and contradictions involved in the processes of social mobility through HE.

Keywords:

• Non-traditional students
• higher education
• habitus transformation
• bourdieu
• social inequality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The results of the survey can be found in Montes and Tarabini (2019). In this previous analysis, a typology of trajectories of access to HE was constructed, emphasizing those that presented social and educational indicators of non-traditionality, such as the existence of fragmentation, destandarization, non-linearity and reversibility processes.

2 This classification is based on Montes, Rujas and Jacovkis (2022) and has been constructed using the following categories: labour market position and economic capital, education level and cultural capital, social capital and distance(s) in the school field.

3 Even though education in Spain is compulsory until the age of 16, at the national and international level the completion of upper secondary school (16–18) has been established as the minimum threshold that guarantees full social development (Tarabini 2022).