Browsing by Author "Ekroth, Piritta"

Aims. This thesis focuses on female university students with a working class family background. The study examines, how the girls end up studying at the university, what are their primary reasons for academic studies, and what are the goals they are hoping to achieve by academic studies. The study also seeks to answer the question, how social class is constructed in the girls' stories. Although the Finnish society aims to achieve educational equality by providing a variety of different kind of structural elements – like free education, in reality students have diverse resources to exploit the many opportunities. Social class and gender, for example, influence these opportunities greatly. A child of an academic family has eight times bigger chance to reach university level studies compared to a child from a working class family. The academic research on the area of inherited education can't manages to explain why working class children, against all odds, advance with their studies to an academic level. The theoretical part of this study is based on feminist social class studies and Bourdieu's Field theory. Methods. This is a narrative study and the research material consists of seven stories of the female university students, who consider themselves as working-class children. Three of these students went to university directly after high school, and four of them have also studied in universities of applied sciences. Life stories that were gathered with narrative interviews concerned the lives and educational paths of these women. Stories were interpreted with a narrative analysis. Results and conclusions. Despite the apparent equal education opportunities, the women told real survival stories about their journeys to university. The women recognized their social class, but didn't agree with it. They wanted to be distinguished from the working-class with a mentality of entrepreneurship. They also considered social class something that was formed merito-cratically depending on what a person deserves with his/hers own actions. Education was considered as a ticket to better life. Encouragement and independent choices played an important role in the stories. However, working-class women didn't consciously separate themselfves from the norms of their class, but were fulfilling their parents' beliefs in that education is the mean to achieve better life.