Students’ HE experience is often imagined and addressed in the singular within the institutional and policy discourse (Sabri, 2011). However, data shows that background inequalities related to familial class position, cultural capital, gender and ethnicity, condition the type degree chosen (Thomsen, 2015; Triventi, 2013), the probability of being admitted to prestigious institutions (Boliver, 2016; Simon Marginson, 2016) the rewards they obtain with their degrees (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016; Rivera, 2015), as well as dropout probabilities (Heublein, 2014; Rodríguez-Gómez, Feixas, Gairín, & Muñoz, 2015; Tinto, 2006). Sociological research allows to acknowledge the diversity of young people’s experiences in universities (Ainley, 2008), to explore the mechanisms at stake in the production of inequalities through higher education and to ‘give voice’ to those experiences and identities that are usually marginalized within institutional representations (Lee & LaDousa, 2015). With HE systems becoming in some western countries almost universal (Trow, 2006), studies are increasingly stressing the importance of exploring how students’ HE journeys are shaped by social inequalities (Amstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Bathmaker, Ingram, & Waller, 2013; Mirza, 2008; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009; Waller, Ingram, & Ward, 2018). 

Based on an ongoing qualitative study on students’ school-to-university transition focused particularly on first-generation entrants (Thomas & Quinn, 2007), aim of this paper is twofold. First, the article provides an exploration of the processes of choosing and enrolling to an HE degree in Italy and on how structural constraints produce uneven access-route to university in a context of (almost) free-access.

Second, the paper focus on the micro-relational processes shaping the way through which students learn how to navigate the HE system, to respond to academic requests and to cope with initial difficulties. Mobilizing Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital, habitus and field, the article shows how class and ethno-racial identities are subjectively experienced in the first phases of the university journey through feeling of misplacement and identity ambivalence. 

The empiric material has been gathered through a longitudinal research design. In-depth interviews have been carried out with a sample of 45 students at the very beginning of their first-year in university. The same students have been interviewed one year later in order to grasp how the processes of adjustment, tensions, and ambivalences surrounding their university journey. Interviews have been carried out selecting a sample of students enrolled in three university courses of a Northern Italian University institutions and these courses have been chosen on the basis of their differentiated drop out rates and on their social compositions.

The research has allowed point out three processes. On the one and the empiric material has allowed to explore how disengagement and progressive disaffiliation is triggered and reinforced particularly during the first-year (in a context where dropout rates are particularly high). Second, it has allowed as well to account for the multiplicity of students' transitions (Gale and Parker 2014). Third, it has permitted to explore issues related to identity ambivalence and the 'hidden' costs (or injuries, Sennett and Cobb, 1977) of social mobility in a context where non-dominant forms of knowledge and way of being are devalued.

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