The paper touches upon one of the “construction sites” (Teichler 2009) of the relationship between higher education and the world of work, namely the transition from education to employment, as it is experienced by students in two European countries: England and Romania. This work in progress aims to describe, understand and interpret the transitional journeys of students in higher education by looking into the reasons why they go to university, what it is like being a student, the tensions of double status positions (work and student life) and how the experience contributes to their planned future employment plans.

In the paper, the concept of ‘education-to-work transitions’ is analysed through the experiences of final year undergraduate and postgraduate students and it is regarded as a process in which students’ pre-university experience influences their application to and experience in higher education as well as their future plans. How and why do students opt to attend higher education courses? How do they understand and describe their student experience? What activities do they engage in? How do they see their future plans in the current economic crisis? These questions help to answer the overarching question of the research: What are the characteristics of school-to-work transitions in two European countries and how does agency and structure shape the experiences of university students? To explore these questions I use the theoretical map of the structure and agency debate, embedding concepts from Pierre Bourdieu (habitus, capital, field, practice), Norbert Elias (figurations), and Phil Hodkinson (turning points).

The research is taken from a biographical perspective, using students’ life stories as a basis for social research in order to understand processes of transitions (Merrill and West 2009). This perspective, as Goodson and Sikes (2001) argue, has “the potential to make a far-reaching contribution to the problem of understanding the links between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’”.

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