Inequality and higher education

paradoxical academic success stories

Abstract

This article presents the results of a research that analyzes the relationship processes with university knowledge of students crossed by new and old inequalities, who have graduated or are in the final phase of their university career. It is therefore involved in the field of studies that address the problems of admission, permanence and graduation in higher education, from a perspective that prioritizes and rescues the students' own oral narratives focusing on how the relationship of these subjects with knowledge, in its social, identity and epistemic aspects. The research analytically reconstructs the mediations between social origin, unfavorable socioeconomic and educational conditions and the successful trajectory in the university. The research approach is qualitative based on case studies. The main findings of the research indicate that in each subject there are different configurations of the so-called old inequalities (social origin, first generation of university students, gender and ethnicity) and the new ones (residential mobility, modifications in life courses and previous educational trajectories), as well as identifying how these have been mitigated and mediated by the relational plots and the own strategies that allowed progress in the studies. Likewise, the processes of their identity construction as successful university students are highlighted, where a self-perception is observed as learners strongly marked by the will, dedication and ability to overcome failures, in an articulated way and fed with the figures of others who They have been significant in accompanying the learning process that implies mastering the type of relationship with knowledge that the university proposes, with a strong assessment of what has been learned in extra-curricular/extra-classroom experiences with a pre-eminence of practical activities.