Access to higher education and the limitations constructed by the different forms of capital embedded in the process have been widely discussed in the international research literature (Darcy-Koechlin & van Zanten 2005; Duru-Bellat et al. 2008; Power et al. 1999; Reay et al. 2005; Wakeling & Jefferies 2013), as well as the interconnection between social and spatial mobility (Savage 1988). Finnish higher education (HE) has a large public market of institutions and provision of tuition-free studies for students as its characteristic features. The admission and access to HE is based on entrance examinations or grades in the end of secondary education, or of their various combinations depending on the discipline and university in question. Egalitarian ideology and the construction of the Nordic model of welfare-state have been in the background, when the system first started to be constructed (Nori 2011, 223). Simultaneously, there is a notion of some kind of de facto educational reproduction throughout the system, despite the generally and equal reputation of the Finnish education (Antikainen, Rinne & Koski 2003). This study aims to look deeper into the social component and the current relations across actors in the transition to HE, and take a more in-depth approach into the actual practices of selection and devices related to those of applicants applying for HE in Finland. The study focuses on the transition from secondary to higher education in Finland from these two perspectives and describes, by using qualitative interview data (n=14), what is it that actually happens in the transition to HE from different viewing angles. The study applies a relational approach (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). The interviewees are high status governmental officials and administrators, private entrepreneurs mainly from the preparatory course market, people from the book publishing industry, student union representatives, and university representatives both from public and private universities operating in Finland. The research task has been to investigate, what are their mutual power relations, how is the field of transition to higher education constructed, how is economic capital involved, and what kind of a space of choice gets constructed in the discourse of these actors. The approach applies theoretical tools from theorisation of reproduction in education and a discourse analytical approach in its analysis.

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