This study explores how educational status and worth are produced, distributed, and negotiated at three different Danish vocational and further education institutions: an electricity training programme at a vocational school, early childhood education and care (ECEC) at a university college, and medical school at a university. The research focuses on the affective and symbolic processes that shape students’ study choices and identities as well as the material and symbolic resources invested within these educational environments.

The study investigates the following research questions:

1. How are educational status and worth distributed, enacted, and reproduced at the three educational institutions?
2. How are these forms of status experienced and negotiated by students in relation to their educational choices?
3. How do the institutions shape students’ identities through their introduction rituals, pedagogical approaches, and institutional habitus?

Theoretically, the analysis draws on educational anthropology and educational sociology concerning how young people make educational choices (Reay et al. 2005) and navigate the landscapes of further and higher education. Doing so, the concepts of institutional habitus (Reay et al., 2010), social orientations (Ahmed 2005) and affective institutions (Zembylas, 2017) are employed to explore how value, worth, and belonging are produced and circulated within educational spaces. Furthermore, the presentation asks how these circulations implicate the students attending the different educations and how this in turn affects social dynamics of educational inequality.

 By comparing three distinct institutions of further/higher education, the study examines how students sort themselves and are sorted through symbolic as well as social boundaries, and how these dynamics relates to sentiments of entitlement, belonging and non-belonging at the educational institutions.

The study is situated in a time in which ongoing reforms are expected to radically change the educational landscape of upper secondary, vocational and higher education in Denmark. This is shaped by a political aim to urge more young people to choose non-academic educations and instead enrol in one of the many vocational and professional educations that lead to the so called welfare professions such as early childhood educator, teacher, and nurse – as well as to skilled professions such as electrician, plumbing and carpentry.

While the effects of this yet remains to be seen, the political processes initiated convey messages on worth and distribute different forms of status to different educations. This raises questions on how status and educational worth are produced and reproduced differently at different education.

The study is based on an ethnographic approach, including participant observations and semi-structured narrative interviews and questionnaires across the three institutions. The empirical material thus includes 48 semi-structured narrative interviews with students, educators, and educational administrators, Ethnographic observations over three months at each of the three institutions, and finally more than 50 questionnaires addressing students' social backgrounds, educational trajectories, and perceptions of their study programme and future profession. In the observations, I have had a broad interest in both symbolic and material aspects of student life. I have thus focused both on student culture as presented in induction processes, classroom interactions, and informal student engagements. And on more pedagogical and material aspects as important aspects of socio-spatial formations, that enable certain forms of interaction and governing of the student body and excludes other. This approach helps me also to shed light on the material and economic differences evident across the three institutions and how these differences are experienced and taken up by the student. In my analytic approach I use situational analysis (Clarke, 2018) to capture the complexity of the empirical material, and to foreground both the narratives and observations, but also the broader socio-cultural context of the students’ experiences, transitions and meaning-making. Furthermore, I use the concept of orientation (Ahmed 2005) to grasp, how the students orient themselves in the diverse settings of the institutions, and how these orientations are formed also by their history and prior experiences. Finally, the study uses a comparative analytical framework to examine how each institution presents itself to new students, how different forms of symbolic capital circulate, and the ways students internalize, negotiate, or resist the status attributed to their chosen educational pathways.

The preliminary analytical findings of this work suggest that students’ educational choices are formed by complex affective and social orientations that are shaped both by past educational experiences and expectations for the future. This points to some extent of social inertia in students’ choices that risk reproducing social inequality through higher education. By exploring educational status and worth through comparative analysis of three educational institutions and through the concept of institutional habitus, the expected outcome of this paper is to show, how student’ social orientations as well as the different material and symbolic resources at the different educational programmes significantly shapes student experiences and their sense of social worth. This will be illustrated through empirical analysis in which students as well as the three institutions offer contrasting narratives of status and belonging. For instance, while Medical students experience strong institutional support, high social status, and clear professional pathways that seems to reinforce academic and social privilege, this is not the case at the ECEC and electricity training programmes. On the contrary, ECEC students enter a study programme with significantly lower institutional recognition and with lower expectations to both educational and social experiences at their study. This is so also for the future electricians. Thus, vocational students experience a low degree of institutional investment, leading to a sense of marginalization and low prestige, despite high job market demand. The study highlights the affective dimensions of education, demonstrating how students internalize or challenge the symbolic worth of their chosen fields. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for addressing structural inequalities in education and for designing policies that enhance the social recognition of diverse educational pathways.

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