“And it Occurred to Me to Go to the Department… Can You Believe It?”. Transformations in Temporality in an Experience of Admission to Public Universities

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of admittance and permanence in higher education, and inquires about the transformations in the time horizon dimension during an experience of admission to a public university. For young people from the working class, university often does not represent a possible future. Now then, when it constitutes an alternative lifestyle, we find that, in the first section of undergraduate programs, disagreements arise between socially constructed expectations and the specific university access requirements. Here, we will examine such disagreements in a special case, from observing the procedural changes on the perception of university, knowledge, school and work; we will analyze in-depth interviews conducted over one year with Paula, a young woman from a public school in the city of Córdoba embarking on admission to the National University of Córdoba (UNC). In this regard, we ask: what are the effects of an “inclusionexclusion” experience in the construction of the time horizon?