“To get a good job, you have to have an education”

Previous research has indicated that there is a resistance to education among young people in industrial towns. A new thesis based on interviews with young people and parents in Söderhamn, Sweden, shows that this is not the case. They have a positive view of higher education and believe continuing with their education can be necessary to get a good job.

How do young people see their future in a locality characterised by high unemployment and high out-migration? This was the question from which Anna Bennich-Björkman started out in her thesis in the sociology of education. She chose to focus on Söderhamn, a town that used to have a large forestry industry, but which has been hit by high unemployment as a result of the industry’s demise. Söderhamn is also the urban area in Gävleborg County where residents have the lowest level of education.

Positive view of higher education

The thesis is based on in-depth interviews with 40 people aged between 16 and 22, as well as 12 parents, and examines their attitudes towards college or university, collectively ‘higher education’. Bennich-Björkman shows that there is a norm in favour of continuing in education that young people have to relate to. All interviewees also regarded higher education as a good thing.

“There is a very positive feeling about higher education, both among young people and parents. And that was actually a bit of a surprise. Previous research on industrial communities has talked about the existence of a resistance to education that could explain the low level of education. But I saw none of that in my interviews,” says Bennich-Björkman.

The positive attitude was independent of whether the young people were enrolled in higher education preparatory programmes or not. One of the girls in the thesis was taking the building and construction programme but said she might want to study architecture later. Some other interviewees talked about it being “best to continue in education”. Parents also thought it would be good for their children to apply to higher education.

“The parents had a longer time perspective and had seen how the town had changed. They worried that even more jobs would disappear. They therefore saw higher education as a prerequisite for getting a good job.”

Want to get it over with quickly

When young people talked about going on to higher education, it was not so much the programme itself that they focused on, but what it could lead to.

“They want to be independent, get a job and an income and maybe have their own home. Higher education will be a tool to get there and it should preferably go quickly. Many of the young people wanted to start straight after upper secondary school and get it over with.”

This approach differs from the attitude of young people in big cities towards continuing with their education. Bennich-Björkman refers to research that shows that they tend rather to see education as a journey, part of their personal development. In the present study, no one reasoned about education in this way. Furthermore, they did not talk about the older universities. Many wanted to study economics, but no one mentioned the Stockholm School of Economics.

“The pattern I see is that they apply to nearby higher education institutions. This is not a problem for them individually. However, if young people from working-class backgrounds gather at some higher education institutions and young people from academic backgrounds at others, then we have a problem.”

Bennich-Björkman says that a fundamental assumption in much research on the education system is that sharp divisions between institutions and programmes based on social background are not desirable. Political actors also consider that students from different backgrounds should be mixed across institutions and programmes.

“The Higher Education Act states that higher education institutions must strive to widen recruitment. Therefore, it can be considered problematic if the widening mainly consists of an expansion in the scope of the system, while large differences arise between higher education institutions or between programmes within an institution.”

Guidance counsellors have an important role to play

Bennich-Björkman believes that guidance counsellors can play an important role by telling young people in industrial towns about the educational options that are actually available.

“They can help young people who want to study become aware of things they are unacquainted with, for example, by providing information about different higher education institutions. With more and more young people continuing to higher education, action is needed to counteract the stratification we see in Sweden, where some types of students go to the regional colleges and new universities, while others converge on the older research-oriented universities.”

Publication

A. Bennich-Björkman, ‘The Higher Education Norm : Rethinking Paths to Independence and Adulthood in a Former Industrial Community’, PhD dissertation, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala, 2025.

Contact

Anna Bennich-Björkman, PhD in the sociology of education at the Department of Education, email: anna.bennich-bjorkman@edu.uu.se