Right choice, wrong motives? Narratives about prestigious educational choices among children of immigrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Based on twenty-eight in-depth interviews with children of immigrants recently enrolled in education tracks such as medicine, dentistry, engineering, and law, this article presents a new perspective on their choice of prestigious higher education. The aim is twofold: first, to describe these minority youths’ accounts of this choice, and second, to analyse the emerging narratives as part of an identity construction. The narratives highlight the importance of free choice and individuality. Two recurring stories stress that “I have always loved it” and “I was never pushed.” With the backdrop of discourses about parental pressure and lack of autonomy for youth in immigrant communities, narratives of free and interest-based educational choices could remedy a stigma that impedes acceptance by the majority population: that these successful minority youths have made the right choice, but not necessarily for legitimate reasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational choice
• children of immigrants
• parental influence
• autonomy
• identity
• narrative analysis

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the journal’s editors and the anonymous referees for their constructive feedback. I also want to thank Kristinn Hegna, Ola Erstad and Ferdinand Andreas Mohn for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.