Habitus conflicts and experiences of symbolic violence as obstacles for non-traditional students

Baseline situation and background theory

The ongoing expansion of higher education has had a transformative effect on societies in the EU and other OECD countries. The massive influx of new students poses large, and as yet unresolved, challenges to tertiary education establishments. Many universities are facing decreasing budgets, staff shortages and constant pressure to adapt to changes in the local and global employment markets. They are also confronted with a proportional drop in the number of so-called traditional students, i.e. students who are endowed with the cultural education capital ordinarily imparted in middle-class families, are supported by their parents and can study on a full-time basis. In some educational establishments, this student group is now already in the minority (Choy, 2002; Marshall et al., 2012; Munro, 2011; Pechar and Wroblewski, 1998, 2000, 2012; Schuetze and Slowey, 2002). Nonetheless, the massive expansion in higher education has not brought about the expected reduction in inequality (Field and Morgan-Klein, 2013; Reay, 2013; Schürz, 2008; Souto-Otero, 2010).

One of the EU’s stated goals is the creation of greater equality in educational opportunities. Ideally, the social origins and diversity of the student population should constitute a representative reflection of the population as a whole. Dropout rates should also be reduced (Council of the European Union, 2013; European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2015). Furthermore, the creation of equality in educational opportunities is also seen as essential for encouraging upward social mobility. Thus, another measure of success for higher education is the probability of working-class children or children of parents without a university degree graduating from university in a given country. In comparison with other EU Member States, the chances of graduating from university in Austria are particularly low for young people whose parents’ educational attainment level does not exceed lower secondary education, i.e. is below level 3b in the International Standard Classification of Education. Indeed, Austria ranks alongside Slovakia, Italy and Germany as one of the EU countries in which fewer than one in ten of 35 to 44-year-olds from such a social background are university graduates. At the opposite end of the scale are countries like Finland and Denmark, where at least one in three young people with this social background completes a university degree (OECD, 2014).

Blame for Austria’s low upward social mobility in education is often attributed to the country’s education system and, in particular, to its early tracking approach. In this system, the resources and level of educational attainment encountered at home have a much stronger influence on educational outcomes than they might in education systems which postpone tracking to a later stage (Betts, 2011; Brunello and Checchi, 2007; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2005; Piopiunik, 2014). In Austria, tracking begins in year five and results in an early division of schoolchildren into two groups: an academic track, the so-called academic upper secondary schools (Gymnasium), where the chances of gaining the necessary qualifications to go on to university are high, and a vocational track, the so-called higher vocational colleges, where school leavers have only a marginal chance of doing so. This division is amplified by the fact that while pupils at higher vocational colleges come from a range of backgrounds, 70% of pupils in academic upper secondary schools come from families with an academic background. The two tracks also exercise significant influence on the likelihood of entering higher education, and indeed, even on the type of degree studied: while 85% of school leavers from academic upper secondary schools take up higher education within three years of completing school, the corresponding quota for higher vocational colleges is only 54% (Statistik Austria, 2016). While early school leavers do also have the possibility of subsequently gaining a university entrance certificate by taking a special entrance exam (on an academic or vocational basis) and then going on to university, fewer than 7% of all new students in Austria enter the university system via this option (Zaussinger et al., 2016).

To fully understand the extent and logic of social stratification in Austria’s higher education field, it is also helpful to briefly review its development over the last decades. Since the 1960s, in the wake of a strong social democratic government seeking to realise universal access objectives, the Austrian higher education sector has experienced both strong expansion and diversification. Since 1993, the hitherto traditional university-based system has been complemented with so-called universities of applied sciences and – since 2005 – also university colleges for teacher education. At present, the higher education field is divided into four sectors: 21 public universities, 21 universities of applied science, 14 university colleges of teacher education plus 3 private teacher training establishments for the Islamic, Jewish and Catholic religions and 12 private universities. Of these four sectors, public universities still account for the greatest share of total students, namely 78% (Zaussinger et al., 2016).

In historical terms, university access and student numbers have increased fivefold over the past 40 years. This development also includes a steady increase in the proportion of students from non-traditional backgrounds (see below), who tend to be older and often also in employment. However, recent years have seen challenges to this trend: university fees were introduced in 2001, while performance-related access restrictions and the Bologna system have been implemented since 2009 (Wodak and Fairclough, 2010). These measures have not favoured students from low socioeconomic status (low SES) backgrounds (Pechar and Wroblewski, 2011). Indeed, university students are still 2.4 times more likely to come from academic than from non-academic family backgrounds (Zaussinger et al., 2016), regardless of which type of university they attend. Despite increased access, student success rates also still differ significantly according to social background: the average student dropout rate in Austria lies at 35% and thus exceeds the EU average of 31% (European Commission, 2014). There is also an overrepresentation of non-traditional students among dropouts (Thaler and Unger, 2014). One important reason for this may be related to pedagogy: while the compulsory secondary schools assume direct responsibility for students’ learning outcomes and are staffed by professional teachers, university lecturers are not required to do any form of teacher training; university students are thus assumed to be self-organised and intrinsically motivated adults, who are fully capable of surmounting the challenges of higher education on their own (Huber, 1999). But, as will be seen in our analysis below, this pedagogical assumption fails to take account of students’ actual experiences in the university field.

Nonetheless, a closer look at the different fields within the higher education sector does reveal a more nuanced picture, which cannot easily be reduced to students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. For instance, while students from academic backgrounds dominate in subjects like human and veterinary medicine, they are significantly underrepresented in subjects like electrical engineering and business studies (Zaussinger et al., 2016; Nairz-Wirth and Wurzer, 2015). Similarly, low-income and low-prestige subjects related to education, teaching and caring are predominantly studied by women (Kühne, 2006: 628).

Unsurprisingly, the social inequality in the make-up of the student population in Austria has been the subject of a number of different publications (Pechar and Wroblewski, 1998, 2000, 2012; Schmutzer-Hollensteiner, 2014; Thaler and Unger, 2014; Unger et al., 2009, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). Yet the socio-cultural causes of the fact that ‘new students’ with a working-class background (Maton, 2005), or ‘non-traditional students’ in a broader sense, have a significantly higher risk of dropping out (Gury, 2009; Lehmann, 2007; Quinn, 2004, 2013) have so far largely been ignored.

The term ‘non-traditional student’ is not uniformly defined (Kim, 2002). In international literature, non-traditional students can include students who defer the start of their degree course, students who are regularly in paid employment to some extent while at university, students who are members of minority groups, students with care responsibilities or students who do not have a high school leaving certificate (Apling, 1991; Choy, 2002; Horn and Carroll, 1996). In an even broader sense, they can also include students who are members of the first generation in their families to go to university and are thus unfamiliar with the academic habitus (Kurantowicz and Nizinska, 2013; Maton, 2005; Thomas and Quinn, 2007). Latest research findings also suggest that low SES is one of the largest risk factors when it comes to dropping out (Gilardi and Guglielmetti, 2011; Quinn, 2013). Munro (2011) considers the situation for students with a low SES background to be particularly challenging – along with that for those with a disability, those from underrepresented ethnic and/or racial backgrounds and those with behavioural and/or emotional problems. Some experts also contend that it is not uncommon for non-traditional students to exhibit more than one of the above-mentioned identification criteria (Horn and Carroll, 1996). Following Horn and Carroll (1996), we differentiate in this article between minimally, moderately or highly non-traditional students, using the category ‘highly non-traditional’ to refer to students who exhibit four or more of the above-mentioned characteristics.

In Austria, as in many other EU Member States, the challenge to education policy posed by the relatively high dropout rates among non-traditional students has not yet been resolved (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2015; Unger et al., 2010). The European Commission has only recently postulated the need for a comprehensive strategy and financial framework to counteract the high dropout rates at Austrian universities and has criticised that the ‘existing initiatives do not currently provide a comprehensive strategic framework to adequately address the sustainable development of higher education’ (European Commission, 2014).

The aim of this article and the following analysis is to offer a qualitative description of university dropout in Austria, based on the actual experiences of non-traditional students. In an attempt to identify the underlying social structures, pinpoint the specific causes and do justice to a phenomenon that is too complex to be captured by statistics alone, we will endeavour to show how these students’ experience of the dropout process can be conceptualised and more fully understood from a Bourdieusian perspective (see below). Following on from this general analysis, we also offer a detailed discussion of an individual case study (‘Adnan’). Based on both our general findings and this detailed case study analysis, we will then offer some suggestions as to how high university dropout rates among non-traditional students in Austria could be better addressed and reduced.

Theoretical framework

In order to capture the specific dropout experiences of non-traditional students, we draw upon a set of concepts set out by the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu: field, habitus and capital. In the case of traditional students entering university, field, habitus and capital are easily aligned: ‘When habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world for granted’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127). For non-traditional students, however, such an ‘ideal’ interplay of habitus and field would require additional nurturing, i.e. a favourable social situation at school, in the family, in the circle of friends and possibly even in the fields of employment. Failing this, university dropout is more likely to occur: the tensions and gaps between a student’s habitus, their capital endowment and the ‘rules of the game’ that apply in the field of higher education become too large and the student’s illusio collapses (Watson et al., 2009; Reay et al., 2010).

In Bourdieu’s many studies and publications on the education system (Bourdieu, 1996, 1998), he shows that throughout the many fields of higher education, i.e. all the different faculties, disciplines and subjects, the habitus and capital resources of teachers and students differ in line with their respective social backgrounds, religion, gender and cultural preferences. Likewise, as a result of their marked vertical and horizontal orders, higher education fields represent disciplinary cultures which favour different forms of academic, scientific and intellectual social capital (Alheit, 2014; Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2010; Huber, 1990; Mendoza et al., 2012: 562). In the university fields, a person’s preference and suitability for a specific discipline or subject is intricately related to their whole habitus (Bourdieu and Nice, 1980: 279), i.e. their incorporated life history. Both the family habitus – also known as ‘primary habitus’ – that is established by class upbringing, and the secondary – or ‘institutional’ – habitus that is shaped through socialisation in secondary institutions, in particular the school fields, are of critical importance in this regard (Bourdieu 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977).

In this article, we also differentiate between two forms of secondary habitus (Bourdieu, 1996), namely the school habitus (Ingram, 2009) and the university habitus (Alheit, 2014). As will be seen in our findings section, this distinction is of critical importance for understanding university dropout: if, for example, there is a mismatch between an acquired ‘vocational’ school habitus and the subsequently required ‘academic’ habitus, dropout may result. Primary, school and university habitus thus work together in the whole habitus – at times mutually reinforcing each other, at times in contradictory ways, thereby leading to a positive or negative momentum with regard to the ‘rules of the game’ in different university fields. Accordingly, we do not postulate an inner coherence between dispositions and habitus forms, i.e. a unified habitus. Instead, we subscribe to those habitus constellation hypotheses which affirm a plurality and plasticity of the whole habitus (Coulangeon and Duval, 2014: 4; Friedman, 2016; Lahire, 2008, 2014; Silva, 2016). We agree with Lahire (2011) that a plurality of fragmented habitus forms is quite common in modern society and in educational fields, and struggles between dispositions increase the insecurity of non-traditional students.

The importance of such habitus constellations and contradictions for explaining university research is borne out by recent research. Contrary to a long-standing research tradition that has sought to relate university dropout to personal characteristics and character traits of the respective students (Bean and Metzner, 1985; Pascarella, 1980; Tinto, 1975), a host of qualitative and quantitative studies now identify a combination of socio-cultural, structural, institutional, personal and learning factors as the typical reason for dropout among non-traditional students (Quinn, 2013). Christie et al. (2004) also mention wrong course or university choices as a cause of dropout among members of this group and extend this diagnosis to include limited social capital (and thus a lack of information) and lower cultural capital, above all in the first phase of a degree. Working-class students are frequently named as the most important group among non-traditional students and are often described as ‘cultural outsiders’ in the fields of higher education, and especially in the more prestigious disciplines (Aries and Seider, 2005; Byrom and Lightfoot, 2013). Lehmann (2007) describes the social or cultural clash with both the university field and fellow students from a middle-class background that results from a ‘lack of recognizable status symbol’, habitus dislocation and mismatch between expectations and constraints. He refers to the sense of not ‘feeling right’ and not ‘fitting in’ that is experienced by non-traditional students. He points out that students whose parents are themselves university graduates will typically tend to drop out because they fail on an academic level, while two-thirds of first-generation students leave of their own free will for non-academic reasons. These can include family expectations, a corresponding ‘burden of responsibility, which weighs on the student’ (Quinn, 2004: 68), or jumping to the premature conclusion that education is not important after all and that entering the job market right away is the preferential option (Lehmann, 2007). The burden of debts and the double load of having to hold down a part-time job while studying can also lead to dropping out, which itself can also be seen as a solution to the tensions in the primary habitus and an expression of loyalty to working-class culture (Quinn, 2004).

The need to ‘belong’ is indeed a fundamental human desire. It has strong implications for our emotional patterns, cognitive processes and, in particular, motivation (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). Or as May (2011: 368) puts it: ‘belonging links the person with the social’. The feeling of not belonging often corresponds to the feeling of being an outsider, of not fitting in. While the focus in higher education research often lies on insufficient student resource endowments, and in particular the economic, social and cultural capital which students directly or indirectly have at their disposal, the rules and endowment of the university field, which could, for instance, be adjusted to compensate for such resource deficits and ensuing feelings of ‘not belonging’, are not given sufficient attention. Education policy, the perceptions of university personnel and mainstream research disregard central and alterable causes of dropout in students’ personal habitus history, such as insufficient economic, social and cultural capital and a sense of disorientation in the field of the university. A wider perspective on social capital is particularly relevant, because if students only have limited social capital, e.g. supporting relationships, the risk that they will drop out increases. They often lose their motivation to study, which subsequently leads to psychological disengagement and, ultimately, to dropping out (Cemalcilar and Gökşen, 2014; Croninger and Lee, 2001; Davis and Dupper, 2004; Garcia-Reid, 2007).

Since habitus, field and the different forms of capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) are all intrinsically linked, they must also be considered in relational terms. As the empirical case study below will demonstrate, a student can have the necessary competences in the subject they are studying, but still fail nonetheless.

Empirical study and method applied

The empirical study presented in this article is based on a series of 12 narrative problem-centred interviews with non-traditional students who dropped out of different universities in Vienna or other parts of Austria. The participating dropouts were selected using the qualitative methodology developed in constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2008). The interviews were transcribed word-for-word and dissected into appropriate text segments, clauses, sentences and passages. They were initially coded openly without manifest theoretical references, based on the argumentation used by the interviewees and with the resulting codes then merged into categories and concepts. In a further step, the codes and categories were assigned to the theoretical positions encountered in dropout research and to Bourdieu’s conceptual tools and relational methodological approach, which are also compatible with constructivist grounded theory. The coding process was carried out using the QDA software ATLAS.ti.

The 12 interviews, which were conducted in 2014 and 2015, provide insights into a dropping-out process in which habitus discrepancies and unfavourable habitus-field relations for non-traditional students play a key role. The interpretation of the interviews was guided primarily by Bourdieusian theory, but sufficient care was also taken to ensure that the process was not only deductive but also inductive, thus avoiding any mono-theoretical reductionism. The interviews were therefore coded deductively in a first step by searching for interview sequences which allowed inferences about three relevant forms of habitus (familial, school, university) and about possible intra-habitus conflicts. Possible conflicts identified between the three habitus forms depended on their respective compatibility. The inductive coding led us to develop, for example, the categories ‘Experiences of symbolic violence while in education’ and ‘Willingness to submit to symbolic power structures’, both of which could be identified as causes of accelerated dropout processes.

The findings section below exemplifies how these categories might be inferred. Following a general overview of the wide variety of challenges facing non-traditional students in the university field, we give a detailed analysis of one of the case studies (Adnan, a first-generation student with a migration background). Both the general overview and the detailed case study are organised around three principal themes, namely:

General findings

This section provides a general overview of the findings from our qualitative study and, in particular, the diverse hurdles with which non-traditional students are confronted. Our findings indicate that ‘Experiences of symbolic violence while in education’ and ‘Willingness to submit to symbolic power structures’ both constitute barriers to success in higher education.

To understand why this is the case, the experiences of non-traditional students at university must be placed in the context of their school experiences. Our interviewees describe how they already perceived their own status to be lower than that of classmates with a more privileged level of one or more types of capital (economic, social and cultural), even at school. This perception was in part intensified by the middle-class habitus of their teachers and classmates, which differed from their own, e.g. in body language, facial expressions, gestures and style of language.

Yes, it was like that for me when I went to university. You come to Innsbruck from the country and nobody understands you.

(Gerhard, 26, university dropout)

The interviewees’ descriptions of their experiences at school concur with other studies in which schoolchildren report on experiences of symbolic violence (Dunning-Lozano, 2014; Folleso, 2015; Foster and Spencer, 2010; Herr and Anderson, 2003; Ibrahim, 2011). These range from an ostracising teacher and classmate habitus or humiliating exam situations to the intimation that their parents did not have enough academic aspirations. Our interviews indicate that many children from less privileged backgrounds begin experiencing symbolic violence right at the start of their school careers. As a result, they perceive their own habitus to be alien, a feeling which is continuously amplified as occurrences of ostracism and symbolic violence continue throughout their school years and ultimately culminates in latent or manifest intra- and inter-habitus conflicts upon entry into university. This is well illustrated by another key finding, namely that all the interviewees blamed themselves for the fact that they had dropped out – at least while they were in the process of doing so (self-blame; Van Bragt et al., 2011):

I think the only person who is to blame for all this is me.

(Martin, 30, university dropout)

They were always my decisions – if you can call not turning up for an exam a decision, that is. So I can’t lay the blame on anyone else.

(Rupert, 44, university dropout)

Well there were administrative hurdles, but I was probably the one who built them.

(Georg, 24, university dropout)

Interestingly, this self-blame for mistakes, negative assessments and interpretations of situations appears to be less prevalent among middle-class schoolchildren and students. When we interviewed Jasmin and Martin, two non-traditional middle-class students (each with one parent who is a university graduate), they both assigned partial responsibility for their own failure at university to structural factors, i.e. they were both aware of exclusionary practices at university.

I can’t blame anyone, but I don’t blame myself either. A lot went wrong there (…) they looked for a way of basically having me knocked-out (…) and raised the requirements to the extreme.

(Jasmin, 26, university dropout)

We would be sitting in a lecture, and the first sentence you’d hear would be ‘Look around you. Only one in three of you will still be sitting here next year’.

(Martin, 30, university dropout).

When they have had time to reflect on the reasons for their dropping out of university, non-traditional students from less privileged backgrounds will eventually also criticise the structures after they have dropped out, but this is always linked to perceptions of symbolic violence and feelings of alienation:

I see the hundreds of other students and think to myself, ok so I’m one of the 80 percent who don’t make it. Why should I be one of the 20 percent who do?

(Susanne, 21, university dropout)

I never really took myself seriously as a student (…).

(Gerhard, 26, university dropout)

Rupert, another non-traditional student from a working-class background, who started several different degrees and, with the exception of the final exam, almost completed one of them, explained that his habitus did not fit with a selection-based degree and that he had therefore taken himself out of such a ‘competitive field’.

You come to the conclusion that you don’t really fit in there.

(Rupert, 44, university dropout)

The fear of changing one’s own habitus and encounters with alien fields within the university are mentioned directly and indirectly by several other interviewees. Some go so far as to describe studying as a highly risky and dangerous business: it is basically all or nothing, with the added risk of losing the limited job opportunities open to non-graduates. These tensions are expressed in the form of doubt:

What’s the point of working yourself up about it all? Shouldn’t you just start work and focus on succeeding there?

(Adnan, 25, university dropout)

Such statements are mirrored by the interviewees’ ambivalent feelings about having dropped out: while they see this as a failure, they also describe their sense of relief. Jasmin, for instance, reports that dropping out of university was like escaping from a prison or closed institution. Rather than obtaining advice or support from the gatekeepers (counsellors, faculty members) of the desired university field or consulting students who have the desired university habitus, e.g. successful middle-class students, she seeks confirmation for her dropout decision from the people in her work circle (‘my people’).

Like pulling off a plaster. One jerk, not slow. As soon as I had decided to drop out [of university], I spoke to the people whose opinions mattered to me most.

…

And, by the way, it feels incredibly good. I find it really satisfying to see that something works and that what I’m – so I get confirmation that I can do something, that I am capable of something from the business. Nothing else works, but that’s where I get my sense of success. I need that.

(Jasmin, 26, university dropout)

Among other things, these quotes also point to that difficulties non-traditional students face in building the supportive relationships, i.e. the social capital, needed for a successful university career. Non-traditional students often leave school with little confidence that they will ever be able to build up the social capital they need at university. They frequently mention – mostly in a tone of resignation – that their chosen university did not offer any tutoring or mentoring programmes, although these might have been helpful to them in overcoming their sense of alienation. Austrian schools and universities generally have few or no support mechanisms in place to help non-traditional students network with people who have the information capital needed to succeed in the field of higher education.

Indeed, the passages above illustrate how non-traditional students will instead attempt to interpret dropping out and failure at university as a positive experience in life, as an opening-up of their (career) options and a way of re-establishing a clear sense of social belonging. There are both psychological and sociological explanations for this interpretation. From the psychological perspective, dropping out reduces cognitive dissonance (Aronson, 1968). In sociological terms, the actor shifts from a group in which they were excluded to a group in which the habitus differences are reduced. The hysteresis of the habitus and the dominance of the habitus of origin lead to this positive interpretation of the failed ascent (Bourdieu, 1994; Suderland, 2009).

However, we did also observe considerable differences in the way the interviewees perceived and responded to their dropping out of university. Some simply interpreted it as a revisable event in their social ascent and professional development, which they immediately continued to pursue – either by still seeking to obtain a degree, albeit in a less prestigious field of study, or by focusing entirely on advancing in their working lives.

Many passages in the interviews describe how university was like a hurdles race. Although they started out as promising candidates, the interviewees felt they had had to constantly overcome impediments – without adequate support and with a lack of much-needed cultural, social and economic capital. Their ongoing encounters with symbolic violence and numerous problems with university procedures, rules and the – oftentimes socially biased and selective – behaviour of administrative and teaching staff were experienced by many as appropriate for the field, i.e. as a non-changeable symbolic structure. This leads to a successive weakening of the students’ personality structure and a destabilising of their habitus. So it is, in fact, a double hurdles race: habitus-field discrepancies and intra-habitus discrepancies interweave. The two interview passages below show how obstacles and barriers of this kind can ultimately lead to a physical, mental and social breakdown:

So then I was first just drained, emotionally and mentally. Because I, I’d stood in front of such a mountain of rocks and thought to myself, why can’t I be a student.

(Jasmin, 26, university dropout)

So you don’t get to bed until 4 am [after work] and have to get up again at 7 to go to university. You really feel the strain.

(Martin, 30, university dropout)

Discussion and outlook

Our aim in this article has been to shed light on the complex – and as yet not fully understood – causes of university dropout among non-traditional students in Austria. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a relational analysis informed by Bourdieusian theory, we have described and conceptualised this phenomenon in terms of inter-habitus tensions, conflicts between habitus and field, and capital endowments.

Contrary to quantitative studies, we do not claim to put forward a statistically proven network of causally connected ‘hard variables’. However, our interview-based reconstruction of the dropout phenomenon has allowed us to identify and pinpoint specific experiences, mechanisms and underlying social structures of dropout – and understanding these is a prerequisite for developing targeted countermeasures. Our study thus seizes upon on a trend in dropout research that is already commonplace in the school sector and extends this trend to the field of higher education: a heightened recognition of the relevance of ‘soft’ factors, including relationships, pedagogy, trust, emotional security and sense of belonging (Lessard et al., 2013).

In particular, we have been able to reconstruct how the interplay and conflicts between three central parts of a non-traditional student’s habitus, namely the family habitus, a ‘vocational’ school habitus and an ‘academic’ university habitus can lead to an increasing sense of crisis, growing fears of failure, stronger feelings of not fitting in to the university field and, ultimately, an unsuccessful transition into higher education. These tensions are, in many instances, propelled by experiences of symbolic violence and affirmed by an overburdening of symbolic power structures.

There are, of course, also exceptions. Lehmann (2014: 11), for example, has studied successful working-class university students and has been able to describe in detail how, in some cases, their structural disadvantages can also foster resilience. While some working-class students drop out, others draw their motivation for attending university and their determination to succeed from their working-class background. The latter see their background not as a barrier, but as a challenge, and view university as an opportunity not only for ‘gaining new knowledge, but also about growing personally, changing their outlooks on life, growing their repertoire of cultural capital, and developing new dispositions and tastes’ (Lehmann, 2014: 11). In Austria, however, it still remains the case that students whose parents have completed only compulsory education have just a one in ten chance of achieving a higher education qualification themselves, a figure which is below the EU average (OECD, 2014). This is in line with the overall picture established by our empirical findings and underscores the need to look at educational outcomes from an upward mobility perspective, i.e. the chances of the next generation attaining a higher education qualification than their parents (Zaussinger et al., 2016).

Adnan’s case represents a particularly vivid example of this. Against very high odds (related to and stemming from both his immigrant and social background as well as his family and school environments), he progressed successfully through kindergarten, primary school, lower secondary school and upper secondary school, and then passed the Austrian university entrance exam. It was only in his first year at university that the decisive ‘crash’ came. However, as we have shown, the origins of this crash go back much further: while Adnan’s school career might be deemed a success in statistical terms, our Bourdieusian analysis reveals that it also strengthened his ‘vocational’ school habitus, which proved incompatible with the field of higher education. While Adnan’s story is certainly one of remarkable resilience, from a social mobility perspective he was ultimately not able to transcend the confines of his working-class background.

It follows that achieving and sustaining greater equality in higher educational outcomes thus requires a more relational strategy, which explicitly addresses the habitus of the teaching staff, the habitus of the students, the field and the way social, economic and cultural capital are handled. Some efforts are already being made in this direction, and Crozier and Reay (2011: 154) describe an example of such a strategy at one British university: ‘Based on a clear and informative structure, the working-class students who, as we saw, were very unprepared for what to expect at this university, were enabled to develop strong confident learner identities and behaviours leading to success’.

It is also encouraging to observe that the EU’s education studies, strategies and plans are increasingly focusing on dropout from school and in doing so are also taking manifold forms of social inequality and disadvantage into account. Our study suggests that this agenda should be expanded to improving the cooperation between schools and universities, closer management of the transfer processes from school to university and a diversity-sensitive professional development of teaching staff in schools and universities. Likewise, mandatory allocation of mentors or tutors based on individual student needs and specific disadvantages (lack of economic, social and cultural capital) could be another key measure in reducing the high dropout rates for non-traditional students.