For the last decades the social position of the Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher programme has fallen dramatically in the field of higher education. The once social homogeneity among students has transformed into heterogeneity. This study investigates what educational action students take while studying, and making experiences from the programme and how this relates to their individual educational and social resources, and to the overall changes in the higher education sector.

A centrepiece in the study is the relation between what students expect of the programme, on the one hand, and what the programme actually delivers on the other. This is understood as an educational contract. This contract is divided into a labour-market contract and a teaching-contract where the former regulates how teaching content connects with the future labour-market expectations held by the students, and the latter how demands from the programme connect to students’ expectations of what it is to be a university student. In this case it produces educational action that can’t be understood without knowledge about the social disposition of the individual student (elaborated as habitus in this study), as well as knowledge about the social position of the educational programme. The study draws on a longitudinal series of in-depth interviews, supplemented by survey data and historical material.  

Three courses of education were identified. First the completed course, second the drop-out course and finally the changed course where students finished their academic degree but used it to get a higher social position in the labour-market than a position as upper secondary schoolteachers would have given them. The different courses of education exhibit a social pattern that can be understood both in relation to the expanded availability of higher education and to the social dispositions of the students; a key in the understanding of how conditions of the educational contract are formed both socially and historically. Some major findings can be formulated from this. First: Choice of courses of education mainly reproduced already existing internal social differences among the students but were revealed in new arrangements related to the altered field of higher education. Second: Expectations and choice of courses of education can in different ways, be traced to the social genealogy of teacher education. Third: Social pattern contributed to strengthen the on-going falling social position of the upper secondary schoolteacher programme.