University to Work Transition in First Generation Students. Biographical Articulations and Moral Repertoires of Socio-Occupational Projects in Contemporary Chile.

From the 1980s onwards, Chile has had an accelerated growth in higher education enrollment. The massification of higher education has made possible the emergence of new student profiles, increasing the socioeconomic diversity of the system as a whole. Working class students, students who will be the first professionals in their families, students who enter through inclusion programs or with free tuition law, represent today the so-called "new middle groups". The entry of these new profiles into tertiary education has produced changes in the Chilean class structure, but also in educational and occupational aspirations of young adults. Based on biographical interviews and digital diaries, in this project I try to identify and analyze the moral repertoires and meanings related to the managing of transition to work and entry into professional life of first-generation students in order to developpe a biographical and cultural analyses of social mobility and status passage. The preliminary results of my doctoral thesis show the existence of new moral repertoires linked to ideas of good professional, desirable life, valuations of self and others in the construction of their careers, which are expressed in the processes of biographization and guide the practices of labor market insertion. This research attempts to contribute to the study of stratification and life trajectories in order to deepen the knowledge about the ways in which public discourses of social mobility, autonomy and individual responsibility are being consolidated, at a moral level, in the everyday experience of biographical articulation in university to work transition and the construction of the socio-professional trajectories in contemporary Chile.