Reflective trajectories and structural inequalities: A relational framework for the analysis higher education

Abstract

This essay re-examines concepts of trajectories and transitions within Chile’s Technical and Vocational Higher Education (TVHE) sector through a relational framework that articulates structural, institutional, and biographical dimensions. Drawing on Bourdieu, Archer, and contemporary scholarship, it argues that habitus, reflexivity, and agency reconfigure trajectories in a highly segmented social system in which the expansion of tuition-free higher education has broadened access but does not ensure mobility or labour-market well-being. The text integrates structural and biographical approaches to rethink technical–vocational transitions and provides a conceptual basis for future research on inequality, educational–labour subjectivities, and late-modernity processes, situating this framework within the Chilean context.