Widening access to higher education across Europe is considered as central in creating knowledge-based societies (European Commission 2011). Also the recent modernization agenda and the Europe 2020 strategy focus on increasing participation in higher education and enhancing transition of special groups (European Commission 2016; European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice 2014). However, in Austria, like in many other member states of the European Union, access to and retention of university is still distributed on the basis of social inequality (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice 2015; Nairz-Wirth et al. forthcoming). As a result, first-in-family students (students whose parents did not attain higher education) often find themselves confronted with less favorable economic circumstances, compared to students whose parents did attain higher education. This scarcity of economic capital in numerous cases leads them to take up regular, time-demanding employment during their studies (Horn, Carroll 1996; Nairz-Wirth, Feldmann 2015; Quinn 2013). Building on Bourdieu’s theories, several studies have shown that first-in-family students, despite an abundance of economic capital, may also lack other forms of necessary capital (social and cultural) to enact a successful transition into higher education (Spiegler, Bednarek 2013).

While the focus in higher education research lies on insufficient student resource endowments, there is still little understanding on how students overcome these obstacles and successfully negotiate their membership in different social groups and fields. “Given the high risk of potential attrition, the need to gain a better understanding of how this cohort transitions into and engages with the university sector is required.” (O’Shea 2016, p. 60). The outlined PhD project therefore intends to explore how first-in-family students overcome the transition into a higher education environment and successfully balance study and work. To discuss first-in-family students’ experiences from a strength perspective and therefore shed light on students’ agency without neglecting social determinants, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is linked to the conduct of everyday life concept (Schraube, Højholt 2016). Conduct of everyday life is a subject-oriented sociological concept which “attempts to grasp society from the everyday lives of people performing actions in the various areas of their lives” and its basic premise is “that people have to tackle all of the different – in some cases contradictory – demands that they encounter in the various spheres of everyday life.” (Jurczyk et al. 2016, p. 34). Combining Bourdieu’s theories and the conduct of everyday life concept helps to explore first-in-family students’ study-work-balances from a sociological perspective on the macro- and the micro level.

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