The expectations of high school graduates

What do students graduating from public secondary schools want? Immediately entering the labour market, or continuing their studies? Despite the expansion of access and places on offer at secondary schools in recent decades, it is not possible to talk about a true democratisation of this level of education, since exclusion happens within the system itself, as the literature points out, where privileges and exclusions are found to be strongly associated with the social origin of the students. In this context, the concepts of sociologist Bourdieu, such as habitus, cultural, economic and social capital, appear in this study as facilitators in the search for an understanding of how these inequalities are established and how the expectations of students completing this type of education are formed.