Conference Program

Over recent decades, higher education has expanded significantly; however, profound inequalities persist for students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds (McCowan, 2016). In this context, university admissions policies have become central to regulating access. Often grounded in principles of merit, competition, and selectivity, admission systems tend to individualise access as a matter of choice and classification (Mijs, 2016; Reay, 2020), thereby obscuring the structural inequalities shaping unequal trajectories and experiences across the field. Within this landscape, transitions to higher education, understood as socially mediated processes, become critical moments in the configuration and reproduction of inequality within stratified systems (Reay, 2018; Tarabini & Ingram, 2018).

This article presents a comparative analysis of working-class first-generation students’ transitions to higher education in Chile and Ecuador; two countries with massified yet highly stratified higher education systems, but differing in the organisation of admissions mechanisms and institutional provision. In Chile, the admissions system is highly institutionalised and articulated to a mixed provision model, characterised by a strong presence of private institutions and pronounced vertical differentiation. In Ecuador, by contrast, higher education provision is predominantly public, and the admissions system has undergone recent transformations, shifting from a centralised state-led allocation model toward more decentralised schemes regulated by individual universities

Drawing on a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 45 working-class first-generation students (20 in Ecuador and 25 in Chile), including women and indigenous students, the article examines how national configurations of admissions, institutional hierarchies and support structures interact with students’ social positions to shape their educational choices and early university trajectories.

The findings identify shared patterns in students’ transition experiences. Across both contexts, working-class first-generation students encounter a misalignment between university expectations and their material, symbolic, and relational resources, generating experiences of uncertainty, disorientation, and partial understanding of the ‘rules of the game’. In response, students develop pragmatic and often constrained strategies of choice, adaptation and early integration, which tend to reproduce rather than overcome institutional hierarchies. At the same time, the analysis reveals important internal differentiations, showing how classed transition experiences are reworked through intersections with gender and ethnicity, particularly for indigenous and working-class women students.

By foregrounding the transition to higher education as a socially and institutionally mediated process, this contributes to debates on widening participation by showing how admissions regimes and system stratification shape not only access but also students’ positioning and sense of belonging.