The article aims to cover a gap in research, including an ethnic dimension to explore the relationship between people’s trajectories and their experiences at university. Drawing on a retrospective life-story approach, the article compares how 55 respondents of different social origins recount both their routes to university and their experiences at university. By adopting an intersectional lens of analysis, we argue that differential experiences at university affect people’s trajectories of social mobility. Data from two qualitative studies are analysed in this article to explore how class and ethnic background, but also people’s location in urban or rural areas and other aspects of their family situation, affected their educational routes to earning a university place. We argue for the subjective experience of social mobility as a process of achievement, but one fraught with numerous obstacles and challenges. This article shows that respondents from working-class social backgrounds encounter different barriers because of the lack of socioeconomic resources, previous educational disadvantages, class/ethnic discrimination, and family cultural background. Meanwhile, respondents from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds have to face different issues related to their families’ expectations of maintaining their social status. Based on those findings, we suggest that research on social mobility needs to consider multiple and intersectional dimensions that frame an individual’s life trajectories, instead of focusing on movements between fixed educational or occupational positions.

The academic literature argues that understandings of the subjective experience of social mobility differ from objective measure of social mobility – based on occupational patterns of movement – because people tend to conflate changes of the social structure (social change) and changes within the social structure (social mobility), resulting in a limited sense of social inequalities. This article explores subjective understandings of social mobility through the lens of Chilean school-teachers’ narratives of their life trajectories. Methodologically, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 41 teachers who live in Santiago. They were also asked to draw a timeline with the main transitions in their lives. The findings of this article show that teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories are first expressed as narratives relating to their life satisfaction. Differential forms of social comparison that emerge from teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories reveal how people position themselves within a broader structure of social inequalities. In consequence, teachers’ evaluations of their trajectories contain implicit or explicit narratives of social mobility which are often bound up with a subjective sense of social change and life-course change. This article demonstrates that lay understandings of social mobility potentially illuminate academic understandings, by addressing a multidimensional and fluid model of social mobility as well as the practical experiences of inequalities that frame people’s everyday lives.

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