Counselling to stay or to leave? - Comparing career counselling of young people in rural and urban areas

ABSTRACT

Sweden may be wealthy, but uneven distributions of resources still affect students’ access to higher education and career choices. Some variation is linked to rural/urban divides, but myriads of other factors may also influence young people’s options in transitions. Here I explore these issues, using data collected from interviews with study and career counsellors in both rural and urban areas of Sweden, using a framework including Masseyian concepts of place, and horizons of action. The results confirm the general poverty of access in rural areas linked to limitations of locally available educational programmes, an associated tendency for counsellors to promote ‘learning to leave’, and hence ongoing ‘metrocentric’ flows to city centres. However, they also highlight (inter alia) the importance of students’ resources, which enable or constrain their ability to leave and breadth of opportunities (in rural and urban areas), and gendered socialisation factors that may promote or counter the flows.

KEYWORDS:

• Career development
• rural education
• urban education

For young people living in rural areas of several countries, transitions from lower to higher stages of education have been described as necessitating movement from their residential area or a choice between staying in a place offering few opportunities and leaving to widen options (Bjarnason and Thorlindsson 2006; Forsey 2015; Rönnlund 2020; Thissen et al. 2010). Gray, Shaw, and Farrington (2006) have described this as ‘poverty of access’ and Corbett (2007) uses the concept ‘learning to leave’. Most countries offer some kind of study and career counselling in compulsory education, either as a compulsory subject or as a service accessed from school. Moreover, two historically dominant discourses can be discerned: one of matching individuals’ competences to employment possibilities (symbolically as a ‘wage earner’) and the other of matching individuals’ career dreams to educational or vocational paths, regardless of employment opportunities (symbolically as a ‘professional’ or ‘entrepreneur’) (Plant et al. 2003). In study and career guidance, those discourses are usually present in hybrid (rather than pure) form, but one or the other is usually more prominent. Discerning which discourse is dominant in career counselling may be interesting, particularly in rural areas, as study and employment possibilities, as well as career dreams, seem inevitably interrelated with access to education and somewhere to stay.

However, those discourses and career guidance cannot be considered in isolation, as they are profoundly affected by socio-economic conditions (Farrugia 2019; Polesel 2009; Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018) and various other continuous discourses, regarding (for example) life-long learning (Pépin 2007), career management skills (Hooley et al. 2013) and flexibility (Sultana 2013). Key life-long learning and flexibility concepts are rooted in individualism, since the flexible worker goes where the work is (see Corbett 2010 this journal). However, power geometry, sensu Massey (1994), is also important, as some people have much more power and control of movements (or ‘flows’) than others. These are highly pertinent considerations in rural Sweden, as reforms starting in the late 1970s and continuing into the 1990s led to substantial cuts in social services (schools, healthcare facilities, unemployment offices, gas stations, etc.) in rural areas. They also prompted descriptions of Sweden in both mass media and official reports as a country with severe divisions between depopulated rural areas and increasingly populous cities (Beach et al. 2019). Moreover, such imbalances and associated conditions also have much wider implications, as there have been reports of similarly uneven development between rural and urban areas in other European countries (Bernard 2019), the USA (Gurley 2016) China (Jia, Du, and Wang 2017), and globally (Rignall and Atia 2017).

In previous research, most interviewed Swedish youths (15–16 year olds) have described themselves as strongly related to the place they live and the individuals they socialise with there (Rönnlund 2020). However, individual choice and independence of place may seem crucial in their transitions to upper secondary or further education, simply because of a lack of appropriate educational facilities within their region. Thus, when choosing a career, rural young people tend to stress the importance of showing independence in relation to family, peers, and place in order to fulfil career dreams (Ibid.). However, most interviewees have also ambivalently stressed strong connectedness to family, peers and place (Rosvall 2017; Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018).

Little is known about how study and career counsellors in rural areas handle youths’ ambivalence towards staying and leaving in rural areas and the poverty of access, which may provide interesting illumination about the dilemmas associated with transitions to and through higher education in these areas. Thus, this paper reports findings collected through interviews with Swedish study and career counsellors (hereafter, counsellors, for convenience). A specific aim is to critically analyse how counsellors in different places describe their work and its content. The following research questions were formulated to guide the research:

1. How is the counsellors’ work organised, and is its organisation related to discourses of staying and leaving?

2. What do counsellors see as important in their career guidance, and are important factors related to discourses of staying and leaving?

3. How do they describe the place where they work and young people’s possibilities to establish and find work there (i.e. handle the poverty of access in rural areas)?

4. Are counsellors’ answers related to places, and if so how can this be understood?

Although this research focused mainly on rural areas it seemed important to include counsellors in urban areas to identify specifically rural features and potential commonalities. Thus, using Massey’s (1994) concept of power geometry (explained below) I analyse counsellors’ views on place, access and attempts to help students negotiate available career and study opportunities. The results illuminate not only the uneven distribution of opportunities between places differing in geographical characteristics, population densities, and access to social services and further education facilities, but also how counsellors responses are more subtly or ambivalently linked to attachment to place.

The Swedish context

In Sweden, students are not stratified until grade 9, when they make their first choice as they are about to start upper secondary education at the age of 15–16 years. Upper secondary education is not compulsory, but in practice, there are very few other realistic options. About 95% of each cohort continues to one of the 18 national education programmes or one of the five introductory programmes (for those who lack eligibility for a national programme). Each programme has the same curriculum across the country, but the schools may be owned by either municipalities or private enterprises. Twelve national programmes are vocational (for example, Vehicle & Transport, Health & Social Care, Construction, Child & Recreation) and completion of the associated obligatory courses does not provide eligibility for higher education. The six other national programmes are preparatory programmes (for example, Social Science and Natural Science) that provide eligibility for higher education.

By law, every school in Sweden should provide all students with access to staff with competence to meet their guidance needs (Swedish Education Act 2010). However, each school or municipality decides how it is provided, so there are substantial variations in counsellors’ work organisation and practices. In compulsory school, the most intense phase of guidance (provision of information, workplace visits, individual counselling, etc.) is usually in the eighth and ninth grades, when the students are about to choose upper secondary programmes. A counsellor may also be included in the health team that Swedish schools require, which includes a closely cooperating doctor, nurse, psychologist, social worker and staff with competence in meeting special educational needs (Swedish Education Act 2010). This is because health and transitional problems are often intertwined, so health team meetings provide platforms for obtaining information about students who may need more than average counselling.

Literature and key concepts

As already mentioned, increasing divisions between rural and urban areas in terms of economic growth, access to social services (including schools) and employment possibilities have been highlighted (Bernard 2019; Gurley 2016; Rignall and Atia 2017). However, neoliberal ideas that individuals should be regarded as boundaryless and states should encourage international mobility seem to have affected not only societies but also researchers (Farrugia 2014). Thus, few have addressed issues of space, although some have recently started to apply spatial conceptual frameworks of Lefebvre (1991) and Massey (1994). Moreover, much research on social issues generally, and career paths specifically, has focused on urban areas. Less is known about the radically different situations in rural areas, and previous studies have often portrayed young people’s career paths in rural areas as a stark choice between leaving their residential area or staying in a place offering few career opportunities (Farrugia 2014). Choosing between staying or leaving is described as producing conflicting feelings of attachment, detachment, pride and entrapment within individuals, all of which appear to play an important role in future migration intentions (Pedersen and Gram 2017) and as an ever-ongoing process (Stockdale, Theunissen, and Haartsen 2018). Corbett (2007) describes a process of ‘learning to leave’, as discourses in rural schools and communities have shifted from positive portraits of local collectives with a joint heritage and shared values to individualism with less focus on shared commonalities. Gray, Shaw, and Farrington (2006) draw attention to ‘poverty of access’ in rural areas generally, while Alexander (2018) considers relations between geographical locations, uneven distributions of resources and career possibilities, with illustrative examples of the effects of reductions in funding or loans for rural students in the UK. Rural youths may be particularly inventive in using social relations to find resources for accommodation to get access to education away from home (Shucksmith 2012), and paths trodden by siblings, cousins and other close social relations may facilitate their transitions to varying degrees (Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018). These studies have clearly shown that social (parents, family, peers et cetera) and economic resources play important roles in young peoples’ decisions on whether to stay or leave (see also Farrugia 2019; Hopkins et al. 2019) but also on if and when to return (Rérat 2014). It has also been noted that young men may be more attached to rural areas than young women, because more valued employment opportunities and activities are available for them (Rauhut and Littke 2016) as well as identities associated with traditional male labour, i.e. farming, forestry and mining (Little and Panelli 2003). Young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) may be especially disadvantaged in rural areas, as legislation concerning careers rarely accounts for their needs, is generally too universalistic and fails to address deficiencies in local authorities’ resources (Robinson, Moore, and Hooley 2018). Moreover, the neoliberal promotion of boundlessness, free markets and individualism incorporates an ‘unacknowledged metrocentricity’, as it provides substantially more opportunities for people in cities than peers in rural areas (Farrugia 2014; Gulczyńska 2019). Beach et al. (2019) found that staff in schools in small communities seem to be more proactive in terms of counter-discourses and more often acknowledge the local than those in small de/industrialised communities. This reportedly affects young people’s ‘horizons of action’ (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997), a concept largely based on Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and capital, describing people’s perceived possibilities. Habitus, various forms of capital and (thus) horizons of action may be shaped by numerous factors, including characteristics of places (Plant et al. 2003; Rönnlund 2020; Shucksmith 2012). Thus, they clearly warrant attention in analyses of relations between rurality and educational or career transitions.

Reviewing the literature on careers and place, few studies have been found that address how career counsellors relate to place in their practices (see Alexander 2018; Shucksmith 2012). Even though career counsellors’ role in relation to the economic, social (i.e. family, siblings, peers et cetera) and cultural assets of individuals in developing their careers might be minor, it is important to examine their practices. Not least since policy-makers and politicians often place high levels of trust in career counsellors’ ability to counteract stereotypical career trajectories (see for example Cedefop 2009; Sou 2019). However, as stated above, previous studies with broader foci indicate that there are substantial place-related imbalances in power, manifested (inter alia) in metrocentricity (Farrugia 2014; Gulczyńska 2019), variation in resources linked to migration flows (Pedersen and Gram 2017), and poverty of access (Gray, Shaw, and Farrington 2006). These studies provided important sensitising concepts for this article on counsellors’ work and its organisation in relation to discourses of staying and leaving. More specifically, they aided formulation of the four research questions, and interpretation of participants’ responses, particularly regarding rural youths’ transitions in relation to place, rural to urban migration, and the associated learning to leave and cosmopolitan discourses (Corbett 2010; Farrugia, Smyth, and Harrison 2014; Gulczyńska 2019). Thus, in addition to addressing the four research questions on how career counsellors in rural Sweden position their counselling within the generally recognised flows, the study contributes to understanding of place and power aspects of broader concepts (such as metrocentricity) and discourses (such as learning to leave). The analysis extends understanding of discourses based on students’ views, teaching and classroom practices by including career counsellors’ views of their work, and raises questions about potential strategies to address the imbalances in power and associated rural to urban flows.

Methods/methodology

Sweden is politically divided into 290 municipalities covering both urban and rural areas, which are large by international standards (particularly the rural municipalities) and categorised by national authorities such as the Swedish Association of Counties and Municipalities (SKL 2016). We selected three categories to cover potentially important spatial and demographic variations: A1 (large city, with more than 200 000 inhabitants), C8 (rural area, with less than 15 000 inhabitants in the municipality centre), and C9 (rural area with a tourism/visitor industry). A counsellor in each of 12 rural municipalities and 5 counsellors in socioeconomically different districts in one urban municipality (5.8% of all municipalities in Sweden in total) were interviewed. The municipalities selected for the study provided variation in terms of latitude, demography, distance to higher education facilities and local labour market. There is no upper secondary school in some municipalities in Sweden, so counsellors with students in grade nine (their last year of compulsory school) were interviewed. Most were responsible for students in grades 6 to 9, but some had broader responsibility, and in one rural municipality the counsellors were responsible for all pupils and students from grade 1 to adult education (theoretically 7–65 years).

The interviews did not follow a set structure, but a guide was used to check that key questions were covered, to avoid raising issues that were not important to the interviewee and (re-)producing stereotypes, but ensure that all our research questions were addressed. This approach was inspired by Kvale (1996) and has been previously tested and validated by the researcher (Rosvall 2015). Each interview (conducted by the researcher) started with a set of warm-up questions, then the interviewees were asked how they carried out their work. This was followed by questions like ‘Can you further describe … ? and “Do you see other things as important … ” to acquire more detailed views regarding their work, and their experience of the students’ thoughts and places. Each interview lasted 40–60 minutes and was digitally recorded and transcribed. Names of the municipalities have been changed to ensure confidentiality, and the faux names of municipalities (and counsellors working in them) of categories A1, C8 and C9 start with the letters L, R and T or V, respectively (Table 1).

Table 1. Categories, faux names, and presence or absence of an upper secondary (with numbers of national programmes offered, if present) of the interviewed study and career counsellors’ municipalities. Whether or not they counselled in more than one school is also shown.

Municipality category/Faux name	Upper secondary school in the municipality	Counselling in more than one school
A1 large cities (over 200 000 inhabitants)
Lake	Yes, all 18 national programmes	Yes
Logan	Yes, all 18 national programmes	Yes
Lou	Yes, all 18 national programmes	Yes
Landry	Yes, all 18 national programmes	Yes
London	Yes, all 18 national programmes	Yes
C8 rural area (less than 15 000 inhabitants in the municipality centre)
Reed	Yes, 9 national programmes	No
River	Yes, 13 national programmes	No
Rory	Yes, 7 national programmes	No
Remy	Yes, 9 national programmes	Yes
Rudy	Yes, 9 national programmes	Yes
Rowan	Yes, 11 national programmes	Yes
C9 rural area with a tourism/visitor industry
Tanner	No	No
Toby	No	Yes
Tyler	Yes, 7 national programmes	Yes
Tatum	Yes, 6 national programmes	No
Taylor	No	No
Val	Yes, 4 national programmes	Yes

The transcripts were analysed using a theoretical framework rooted in concepts of power geometry (Massey 1994) to facilitate analysis of place- and agency-related variations in groups’ and individuals’ resources, opportunities and horizons of action (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997). As noted by Massey (1994, 149) ‘some people are more in charge of it [differentiated mobility]; some initiate flows others don’t’. There is an important acknowledgement here of the duty of the state towards the citizen, as part of a social contract, whereby the individual’s employability is enhanced through a study and career guider (cf. Sultana 2013). In order to analyse the acquired data, the counsellors’ explicit and implicit comments on their work and its content were first manually extracted from the 17 interview transcripts. Even though excerpts of each municipality category A1, C8 and C9 were kept separate, the analysis was not initially selective but rather explorative, seeking to identify examples of both minor and major concerns (cf. Braun and Clarke 2006). In the next stage, the theoretical framework (outlined above) was applied in analyses of the extracts in an effort to separate and examine concerns related to the concept of power geometry in more depth (Massey 1994). Thus, excerpts were coded in terms of associations with the distinct manners in which different social groups and individuals were placed in relation to the flows and interconnections of social, economic and cultural resources. Although the analysis focused mainly on place, different groups and individuals inhabit distinct positions in terms of cultural, social and economic resources, which influence their opportunities to initiate flows. Various thematising approaches were tested. However, the classic division by research question appeared to best represent the material and was thus adopted with the addition of subheadings.

Findings regarding municipality categories C8 and C9 did not differ in many respects, so rural municipalities refer to both categories in Results section, unless stated otherwise.

Findings and discussion

In this section, findings regarding research questions i–iii are sequentially presented under a separate heading, although there is some overlap in the answers. Findings regard question iv are integrated into the presentation of answers to questions i–iii, and are the main topics addressed in the conclusions following the findings.

Organisation

Analysis of the transcripts indicated that the organisation differed between places in terms of possibilities to arrange group activities participates in health teams, arrange practical work experience, and work at one or more schools. Whether the counsellors lived in the areas where they worked also influenced their practices. Scope for arranging group activities and participate in a health team may seem to have little relevance at first to students staying or leaving. However, the findings indicate that these variables are related to equality of opportunities to choose to stay or go. For example, individuals mentioned in health teams’ discussions generally have fewer than average resources. Thus, the greater knowledge of those individuals obtained from inclusion in a health team could help counsellors advise them and offset some of their disadvantages. The argument is also supported by earlier findings that individual economic, social and cultural resources influence individuals’ desires to stay or leave (Polesel 2009; Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018).

Organisation, counsellors’ contracts: Since every school or municipality organises its own counselling service, all the interviewees were asked about their duties and time spent on the most common tasks (e.g. individual guidance, group guidance, dissemination of information and administration). They all said that they spent most time on individual guidance. The administrative element varied, mainly depending on duties included in their work. The most striking differences were between those who counselled in one school and more than one. Six of the 12 counsellors in the rural areas worked at one school, while the others had to work in more than one, due to the low number of students in each school, so the time spent at each school could be limited. However, they worked in the same schools year after year. Moreover, counsellors in two of the smallest rural municipalities who were responsible for both compulsory and upper secondary schools said they had a holistic view of students’ needs since they met them from early ages, and in most cases knew the parents and the environment. In contrast, in the large city, the study and career guidance service was outsourced and centralised. So, each school signed a contract with the central organisation regarding numbers of hours the counsellors spent at the schools and the duties included, and counsellors could have short tenures before being switched to another school.

With many students to counsel and other administrative duties, each counsellor had limited time for each student (generally students had less than 20-min guidance, apart from group activities during their time at compulsory school). Most counsellors, in both rural and urban schools, strongly felt this was insufficient (cf. Lundahl and Olofsson 2014) and fragmentary. However, there were variations in organisational reasons for, and implications of, the fragmentation. In the rural municipalities where the counsellors divided their time between different schools, they still seemed to think they were familiar with the local area, the students they counselled and the students’ families, which greatly improved their ability to provide appropriate advice. The counsellors in the large city had less information that they could relate to local conditions, so often they could only offer more generic advice. All five participating counsellors working in the large city worked at more than one school, and not necessarily the same schools for more than a year:

Usually you continue at the same school year after year. But if their numbers of students change, schools want to change the hours we spend in them, which might affect a number of counsellors. Our employer wants to give use close to 40 hours a week employment, which requires some juggling. […] Positions at upper secondary schools are more attractive, so if one comes up there is also some rotation of counsellors. (Lou)

The counsellors said the temporary nature of the arrangements and employment by an external organisation also favoured individualised counselling:

The limited time I spend at each school makes it difficult to develop cooperation with teachers. The contract also stipulates individual counselling. However, I don’t feel that I’m expected to do cooperative work as I have a different employer. (Lake)

The differences in counsellors’ contractual arrangements in rural municipalities and the large city seemed to strongly influence their working arrangements and, thus, counselling activities. In the large city, the counsellors were less attached to the area since they commuted from other areas in their city, and thus knew little about families of students they counselled or local employment opportunities. In addition, the short-term contracts with each school hindered possibilities to develop cooperation with teachers and seemed to affect the counsellors’ sense of obligation and opportunities to develop cooperative initiatives with local enterprises for workplace orientation. Thus, their contracts arguably made their counselling activities more general as they had limited background information on the students, their families and the local area. However, the counsellors in the city argued that employment by a centralised organisation had other advantages, such as facilitating the exchange of experiences and capacity-building with other counsellors, which they argued was more difficult in rural municipalities with fewer inhabitants and counsellors.

Organisation, organising student group activities: Most of the counsellors in the rural areas mentioned wishes or interest in changing their practices and including more group activities (providing information, student workshops on vocational norms, workplace visits) and/or more team work with teachers in current practices. No counsellors in the large city talked about changing their practices, which were more structured by their contracts, and they did not seem to question their contractual arrangements. When the counsellors in rural areas talked of possibilities to increase group activities they indicated that changing practices were hindered by organisational traditions, as study and career guidance were regarded as an individual activity, and resistance or lack of support from teachers or heads:

Teachers at this school are very restrictive in letting me into their classrooms or using their lesson time for counselling activities. (Tyler)

I don’t get any support from the management for cooperation with teachers. (Toby)

Nevertheless, a few counsellors in the rural areas said that they had started projects to start counselling in classes in earlier grades and/or strengthen ties with employers in the area. For example, one interviewee (Val) mentioned interest from a school’s teachers and head:

The teachers have discussions on vocations with the students. The teachers are very interested and come and ask me how to include learning about vocations in their subjects. […] I and the head have started to talk about a project on gender-neutral career choices. (Val)

Val worked full time at a medium-sized school, which seemed to facilitate collaboration with teachers, the head and local businesses in arrangement of practical occupational experience. This, and obstacles other counsellors encountered, strongly suggests that an individual career counsellor’s ambition to include more group activities is not enough to change practices. Policy-makers, practitioners, and others express desires to increase proportions of group counselling for several reasons. Inter alia, it is easier to discuss general choices and parental pressure at a group level than in individual career counselling, especially if the individual is just about to make a choice (Farrugia 2014). However, in order to increase group activities, obstacles potentially including contractual clauses in urban areas and lack of support from teachers and/or heads in rural municipalities may have to be addressed.

Organisation and enhancing services for students at risk: As already mentioned, some counsellors were members of their school’s health team. They said this was time-consuming but important because they had longer-term perspectives for the students than school nurses and teachers, who had more immediate concerns (the students’ current health and grades). Participation in the health team was also considered important for obtaining information about, and contact with, the most vulnerable students.

I get important information about students who are at risk of failing to get enough merits to start a national upper secondary programme. […] It is important to have such information when counselling students, giving them some kind of recognition. Nevertheless, when it boils down to what is feasible, their short-term choices are very limited. Usually they have to attend an introductory programme in our municipality. (River)

The counsellor confirms previous findings that lack of sufficient merits to enter an upper secondary programme substantially limits students’ possibilities (Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018). Every municipality must offer introductory programmes for students that provide eligibility for a national programme, but they are the only programmes some municipalities offer. In addition, students only get financial support for living and travel if the upper secondary programme they choose is not offered in their municipality. Thus, choices of students taking introductory programmes are restricted in terms of both numbers of programmes and where they can stay. This applies to students in both rural and urban municipalities. However, a career counsellor in a health team may be able to give a student ‘some kind of recognition’, as mentioned in the excerpt above. Thus, some students in rural areas may have a slight advantage in this respect as none of the counsellors in the city were included in schools’ health teams. The nature and potential value of such ‘recognition’ warrant further attention.

According to Massey (1994), places are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations (121). Thus, when counsellors do not live in or participate with either other school staff or employers in the area, they will have very limited networks of social relations connected to the place. The duties of counsellors in the large city schools did not include tasks that may have enhanced local connections, such as participating in a health team, collaboration with teachers or arranging practical occupational experience. Moreover, many of them lived outside the area where they worked. Thus, loose attachment was more common in the large city, and I hypothesise that it fosters guidance that is not particularly situated and does not associate values to any particular place. Thus, it may promote leaving to go anywhere in the world. This hypothesis is developed in the next section regarding counsellors’ expressions about important themes in their guidance.

Study and career counsellors’ expressions about important themes in their guidance and activities

Analysis of counsellors’ comments about their guidance and activities provided the following indications of how they ‘navigate’ between dominating discourses of individualism and connectedness.

Focus on the individual as unbounded by place

Most of the counsellors said they followed a plan or guide in their individual counselling. None said that they strictly applied a manual or method, but they wanted to cover some questions or themes, without steering the discussion too much. Focusing on the individual student’s interests was the most prominent theme, i.e. without prompting the counsellors said that in their individual counselling they talked about what the students liked to do more than where they liked to stay:

I try to be objective and base the conversation on the student’s interests. (Logan)

I try to make the students aware of their own interests, what they like to do. (Taylor)

One counsellor (Remy) also said that he emphasised the students’ interest by trying to provide neutral guidance. However, he felt torn between personal desires and professional requirements in this respect:

I feel torn between my political desire to keep the students in the municipality and the call of my profession “To be neutral in my guidance.” (Remy)

Focusing on students’ interest with little attention to where they want to establish or continue to develop social relations implies that places are not intertwined with social relations (or the intertwining is not important). Since possibilities to fulfil study and career dreams are not evenly distributed geographically, it also promotes an understanding that learning to leave may be necessary for individuals to access study and work opportunities that fulfil their dreams. This conclusion is consistent with the argument of Corbett (2010) that reforms in industrial and post-industrial capitalist societies have been a protracted engagement with moving young people out of the specificity of their places into a universality that overcomes the limitations of place (cf. Lefebvre 1991). The focus on the individuals’ interests rather than connection to place in the counsellors’ guidance could then be understood as a continuing element or reinforcer of this protracted engagement.

There was little indication that counsellors balanced the focus on the individuals’ study and vocational dreams with considerations of place. Even Remy, who implied that he wanted to talk more about possibilities to establish locally seemed to regard such talk as ‘political’ and inconsistent with study and career guidance policies and/or ethics. He did not seem to recognise that avoiding talking about the local labour market or ways to establish in the local place is also ‘political’ (cf. Alexander 2018; Sultana 2011; Thomsen 2012). However, the counsellors focused most exclusively on individual students’ study and vocational dreams in the large city, where facilities offering opportunities to fulfil most aspirations were within commuting distance. Instead, they talked about the difficulty of choosing between similar educational options for students, and mentioned the importance of schools’ status for some students:

Choosing an upper secondary school is difficult for the students. The school market is complex. The students don’t know much about different schools. Some seem to think there are strong links between a school’s entry requirements, its quality and status, so they base their choices on last year’s entry thresholds. (Logan)

Study and career counsellors in the rural areas more often mentioned covering themes in their guidance, consciously or spontaneously, that were not directly linked to individual students’ study and vocational dreams. Unlike the large cities, none of the rural areas where these counsellors worked had an upper secondary school offering all 18 national programmes (see Table 1). Eleven of the 12 counsellors in rural areas (including those in rural areas with a tourism industry) said that their geographical positioning was an important aspect for the students they counselled:

For most students there are no realistic options other than one of the programmes offered in the closest upper secondary school. It is too far to the next one. It takes too long to commute or is too expensive for most to get somewhere to live during their studies. (Toby)

This excerpt needs problematisation in relation to the theoretical framework of power geometry. Initially, all interviewees said they focused mainly on students’ interests in their individual counselling regarding the study or work options, ignoring locations of the options. In some cases, this may simply be because there are no realistic alternatives geographically, so there is no need to mention place during counselling. However, in some cases, it could be symptomatic of a kind of fatalism in relation to place, and capitulation to ‘metrocentrism’ and the power geometry (Beach et al. 2019; Campbell and Yates 2011; Gulczyńska 2019). This refers to aggregation of all forms of capital around large cities and their centres, accompanied by increasing ‘poverty of access’ (Gray, Shaw, and Farrington 2006) in rural areas to services, including opportunities for upper secondary and higher education. In some cases, the discourses of individualism and learning to leave may also contribute to the low attention to place in counselling, and enable increasing subordination of rural to urban. My findings indicate that counsellors do not consider social, cultural and economic attachments of the students to their places (at least not explicitly). Thus, they do not help the students to be critically or politically aware of distinctions between places, and their hierarchies of opportunities. They do not raise the limitations and restrictions of rural areas and how they might be addressed, or the potential strengths and weaknesses of social networks associated with places.

Restrictions on leaving

As stated above, the discourse of fulfiling one’s study or vocational dreams regardless of place seemed to be a strong element of the counsellors’ talk about their individual guidance of students. Thus, I argue that the students were implicitly understood as individuals who would go anywhere for studies or employment to fulfil their dreams. However, there were also implicit and explicit suggestions that metrocentric pressures could not be avoided and that career options were inevitably connected to social, economic and cultural resources:

Those who live west of our municipality centre go to the upper secondary school here. Most of those who live east go to the city by the coast since they have better commuting opportunities. However, those without complete merits for upper secondary school have to go to the municipality school, regardless of where they live. (Rory)

Most of those who want to go to an upper secondary programme not offered here experience economic stressors. Some might use social contacts with relatives or friends to get a place to live. (Tyler)

One of the counsellors stood out in this respect by arguing that geographical positioning did not affect choices of students in the area where s/he worked:

This is a socioeconomically strong area. Most students choose a higher educational preparatory programme as their upper secondary programme. Moving is not an issue. They are quite determined in what they want to do and their parents support them. (Tatum)

In contrast, others said their students simply had to accept what was offered without too much financial or commuting constraint:

Not many mention the place as important in their choice of upper secondary school. 89 percent stay. There are more discussions in the first talk. In the end economic and social obstacles become too severe. A few don’t consider themselves mature enough [to leave]. (River)

Thus, in accordance with earlier studies (Rosvall, Rönnlund, and Johansson 2018), the respondents clearly indicated that economic, social and cultural resources strongly prescribed the students’ horizons of action (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997), both in terms of study or vocational options and geographically, particularly in rural areas. River was a counsellor in a school in a municipality with its own upper secondary school that offered two thirds of all Swedish national programmes. River did not say how many of those who stayed for economic and social reasons restricted their choices of upper secondary programme to one of those available. However, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of those students’ horizons of action (cf. Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997) were restricted by their geographical positioning and resources.

An interesting finding, illustrated by the presented excerpts, was that despite initially saying that they focused on ‘the students’ interests’ in individual counselling, counsellors in both rural and city municipalities provided examples of students’ options being restricted by deficiencies in resources (social, cultural and/or financial). Thus, the notion that options were not bound by places seemed to be much truer for some than for others. In terms of dominant career discourses, limitation of resources seems to shift advice away from the discourse of matching educational or vocational paths to aspirations, regardless of employment opportunities, to matching individuals’ competences towards available employment (wage earner) possibilities. However, the students in rural areas who lack resources seem to be most restricted since it amplifies the ‘poverty of access’ (Gray, Shaw, and Farrington 2006) associated with their geographical positioning.

The counsellors’ responses show few indications of any counter discourses to individualism. Most, including all those in the large city, said they primarily focused on the individual students and matching their interests with an upper secondary programme or career. Little attention was paid to students’ interest in maintaining established social relations, or continuing activities connected to their local place. They appeared to regard place, and young people’s connections to a place, as much less important than getting an education and employment matching their aspirations, and place mainly became relevant if lack of resources narrowed a student’s choices.

Study and career counsellors’ comments about the local place and possibilities for establishment

Although the counsellors said they primarily focused on individual students’ interests, counsellors in the rural municipalities also said they considered, at least in some cases, the local place and possibilities for establishment locally.

Resources to stay

Important social relations for establishment: Shares of cohorts who choose a vocational programme are traditionally highest in rural areas. This pattern is usually attributed to people needing to be multi-skilled, adaptable and hard-working (rather than highly academically educated) for many traditional occupations in rural areas. Sometimes extensive networks of family or relations in the neighbourhood have also been regarded as more important than educational credentials, as one of the counsellors implied:

Here you get work through knowing someone. (Tanner)

However, due to the restricted opportunities for further education associated with vocational programmes following the reform, and increases in occupations requiring higher education (Lundahl and Olofsson 2014), fewer students are choosing vocational programmes now, even in rural areas (Rönnlund, Rosvall, and Johansson 2017).

Counsellors in rural areas included more activities in their guidance that promoted the local than counsellors in the large cities, and a few rural municipalities arranged activities to promote local employers and industries. Thus, vocational education was promoted since local enterprises and occupations required it more than education that prepared students for further studies. Intriguingly, there was less focus on the local in the rural areas with a tourism industry than in the other rural areas, and the counsellors said the tourism industry did not seem to attract students they counselled, which surprised them. Speculatively, this may have been at least partly due to the tourism industry and associated occupations in those areas having a short history. Thus, the occupations may not have been within the young people’s horizons of action due to lack of socialisation by their closest family as role models and other cues of social acceptability (cf. Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997). Another factor is that the tourism industry may be regarded as a ‘transfer occupation’, i.e. something you do as a youngster that does require a specific education or skills (Urban 2013).

Resources to stay: more common for men

The local-promoting activities addressed occupations that are traditionally associated with both men and women, but most mentioned were linked to male-dominated trades: heavy industry, construction, and transport. This seemed to raise complex intersections of gender-based expectations, opportunities, social reproduction and place (Massey 1994) that influenced both boys’ and girls’ horizons of action, as briefly alluded to by Rudy in the following excerpt.

We have two large industries. Those mostly attract boys, and some boys choose a vocational programme to match competences needed within the industry. […] Err, not so many things keep the girls attached to this place actually, which leads to more girls than boys being stressed about their upper secondary school choices. There are few things here that girls can relate their choices to. (Rudy)

Rory also said there were more opportunities for boys, and more visible examples of men as role models, in his rural area:

There are more visible examples of role models, both in vocations and leisure time for boys. If the fathers have a lorry driving enterprise, then the boys choose the Vehicle Maintenance & Transport programme. Fewer girls make such choices, but occasionally one or two choose the Health & Social Care programme because their mothers work in the health service. (Rory)

Those findings add to conclusions of a project mentioned in the beginning of this paper, that fewer activities and local networks supported young women’s interests, i.e. the activities and networks focused on traditionally male-dominated areas, such as hunting, snowmobile driving and ice hockey (Beach et al. 2019). Thus, not only do activities and networks apparently provide more support for young men to stay in rural municipalities, career counselling activities that promote the local also seem to be more commonly directed towards young men.

In the large cities, the career options are extremely complex and career guidance largely abstract, due to the complexity of the upper secondary school market, plethora of vocational opportunities and restricted local knowledge associated with counsellors’ contracts. In the rural areas, there are more activities that could increase students’ awareness of what specific occupations are really like, but the vocational opportunities are more limited than in the cities. Moreover, most opportunities and activities seemed to be directed towards occupations that are traditionally associated with men (cf. Rauhut and Littke 2016). In addition, working in the family business seemed an obvious choice for at least some students in rural areas, while this form of social reproduction was not mentioned at all by counsellors in the large city.

Conclusion

All the counsellors noted a pattern of most young people heading for the centre: students in cities heading for schools in the city centre and those in rural areas heading for the nearest larger community or city, if the geographical, economic and social costs were not too high (Hopkins et al. 2019; Pedersen and Gram 2017). The counsellors’ responses reveal that geographical mobility implied social mobility, and moving away was more financially and socially stressful for the less privileged. Analysis using Massey (1994) concept of power geometry confirmed that geographical mobility and social mobility are closely intertwined (cf. Landri and Neumann 2014). Thus, what is hard in the city seems to be harder in rural areas and have greater implications.

The results also highlight the difficulties of formulating career development policies that cater effectively for both urban and rural students (cf. Atkin 2003). Marketisation of Swedish education since the 1990s (Lundahl et al. 2013) has increased opportunities for young people in the cities, while opportunities in rural areas have decreased (Fjellman, Yang Hansen, and Beach 2018), structural changes which again can be referred to the concept of power geometry. However, consequences of those policies and trends are seldom discussed in relation to career and place, which also seems to be reflected in the counsellors’ emphasis on individual students’ study and career dreams, regardless of place.

In this article, I have compared study and career counsellors’ talk in relation to discourses of staying and leaving and how this differs between places. Finally, I consider the findings in relation to Massey (1994) argument that some are more in charge of flows than others and Sultana (2013) claim that ‘a new social contract’ has emerged:

[There is] an important acknowledgement of the duty of both the employer and the state towards the citizen, as part of a new social contract, whereby job insecurity is tolerated on condition that the employability of the individual is enhanced through employer and state investment in education and training. (Sultana 2013, 157)

Many rural areas in Sweden, and other countries (Beach et al. 2019; Çiftçi and Cin 2018) have long resisted the erosion of civil services, such as closures of schools, health services and bank offices, and fought for the maintenance of equal standards in services such as tele and internet communication. In such environments, employment insecurity has been part of the landscape. Despite the social contract Sultana describes, employers and the state have made little investment in education and training in rural areas. Thus, although counsellors in these areas engage in more local-promoting activities than their colleagues in cities, they can do little to stem the flows towards the centres. However, the flow-countering activities (and networks) seem to favour some more than others. In particular, they seem to focus on vocations traditionally associated with men. Thus, there are more viable possibilities for young men to stay in their local rural area, if they wish (cf. Little and Panelli 2003; Rauhut and Littke 2016). However, for those in rural areas who do not want to stay, but lack sufficient merits for a national upper secondary programme, there seem to be few routes towards the ‘cosmopolitan’ ideal of choosing a career regardless of place. According to the counsellors in rural areas, limitations of cultural, social and economic resources narrowed opportunities to leave (Pedersen and Gram 2017; Stockdale, Theunissen, and Haartsen 2018). These counsellors were more informed about academically vulnerable students than their colleagues in the city, since they were more commonly included in the health teams. However, they could do little for such students to equalise their opportunities to stay or go: students who lacked resources had restricted opportunities.

The findings clearly show that transitions to upper secondary education and careers can be substantially more difficult for students in rural areas than their peers in cities. However, this would be a simplistic conclusion without qualification. The main disadvantage is in the narrowness of viable options: those whose interests coincide reasonably well with available options are not necessarily disadvantaged. Moreover, those with sufficient resources have unlimited options, although the learning to leave discourse then becomes highly relevant. In addition, students in rural areas may have greater knowledge of available occupations than their peers in cities, and more local role models and social networks that can potentially ease their transitions (especially for boys).

This article on how career counsellors position their counselling within these flows adds to the existing literature on youth counselling and transitions in relation to place, especially youth rural to urban migration. The findings raise clear questions about strategies to address these imbalances in power to control the flows. The career counsellors in the rural areas said they wanted to increase group activities. That seems to be a good start, since Alexander (2018) and Thomsen (2012) argue that career guidance in communities should connect participants’ problems and trajectories to social conditions. In this respect, efforts to counter the particularly acute poverty of access of students with low resources, and poverty of opportunities in female-dominated occupations, may be particularly pertinent in rural areas. Better awareness of reasons that some sectors are not currently favoured, such as (apparently) the tourism industry, may be very helpful and enable activities that could potentially alleviate some of this poverty. However, connecting local communities to the wider, global society is also an issue for counsellors in the cities, where contracts seem to foster individual guidance for students, focusing on their dreams regardless of place. Changes in contracts that promote collaborative group activities involving teachers and the surrounding society might be highly beneficial for students in cities, especially those with low resources, and the communities. Overall, our findings suggest that careful attention to resources that restrict students’ horizons of actions, and local socio-economic activities (including gender-, resource- and socialisation-related factors) may be crucial for fruitfully easing transitions not only in rural areas in Sweden, but also more widely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.