From Obligation to Autonomy? Rewriting Educational Success Among First-Generation Students

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Peer Dynamics, Activism, and Resilience

Abstract

Research on social mobility, both internationally and in Sweden, has consistently demonstrated the strong association between young people’s educational attainment and their parents’ level of education. Far fewer studies have focused on academically successful youth who break with this powerful structural pattern, and on how they experience and account for their educational trajectories. This paper approaches social mobility through education as a process rather than an outcome. It examines how first-generation students with migrant backgrounds revise the reasons they give for pursuing higher education as they move from upper secondary school to university.

The paper draws on a four-year qualitative longitudinal study of thirteen academically successful young people whose parents have no higher education. While the broader project includes participants with diverse family backgrounds, this paper focuses specifically on those whose family histories are shaped by migration and socioeconomic disadvantage. Based on repeated unstructured life-story interviews, the analysis adopts a life-course perspective to explore how educational striving is shaped by historical context, linked lives, and key transitions.

In the early interviews, educational success emerges as a moral project, motivated by a desire to compensate parents for their sacrifices, make them proud, and care for them later in life. Between interview waves, participants revise the reasons they give for pursuing higher education, shifting from perceived expectation and obligation toward interest and self-realisation. The transition to higher education functions as a turning point in which earlier justifications are reconsidered in light of academic pressure, new social environments, and changing family dynamics.

By foregrounding longitudinal change, the paper demonstrates that educational mobility among first-generation students with migrant backgrounds is not only a structural shift but an evolving relational process. Rather than simply pursuing predefined futures, participants renegotiate how their educational trajectories relate to family responsibility, personal aspiration, and emerging autonomy.

Author

• Caroline Önnebro, University of Gothenburg