Socio-Geographic Effects On Higher Educational Choices

The main object, in this presentation, is to explore the relationship between socio-geographic background and higher educational choice. Social space can’t be isolated or ignored when it comes to understand human action. The individual socio-geographic setting permeates the way individuals understand and act in the social world. It contributes to social possibilities and constrains, often understood as habitus. This presentation put a socio-geographic focus on a special group of students in a special municipality in the south of Sweden. The municipality is characterized by low progression rate to higher education and a high, but diminishing, rate of blue-collar jobs. The educational level is below national average. Despite these traditions a minor group of pupils do attend theoretical education and receive high grades from upper secondary school. Most of these students progress to higher education. An observation made is that in this group most of the students are applying and attending low prestige higher educational programme at low prestige universities despite their actual more prestigious possibilities. This goes for students with middle-class backgrounds as for students from working class. One suspicion is the existence of a sociogeographic effect on higher educational choices that makes it possible to talk about a sociogeographic habitus, collective in the same way as class-habitus but also unique in relation to other geographic areas. In this paper this is discussed in relation to in-depth interviews with students representative to the above described group.