Between Habitus and Hope

: How Urban Settlement Youth in Sri Lanka Perceive Aspirations and Navigate Barriers to Tertiary Education - A Qualitative Exploration

Abstract

Youth from Colombo's underserved urban communities hold high educational aspirations yet remain structurally excluded from tertiary participation. Prior scholarship has documented this paradox in fragments, treating aspiration formation, family capital, and policy architecture as separate concerns, but has not theorised how these mechanisms interact. This study examines how urban youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds perceive aspirations and navigate barriers in pursuing tertiary education and theorises the structural processes that produce and sustain the aspiration–achievement paradox. The primary data generation phase, carried out between 2023 and 2024, comprised 50 semi-structured interviews with three purposively selected participant groups. These were 20 urban youth aged 19 to 20 resident in registered underserved settlements within the Colombo Municipal Council area, 20 parents or primary caregivers, and 10 education professionals including policy academics and community development officers. Interviews were conducted in Sinhala and English. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis, applied recursively across all 50 transcripts, guided by Bourdieu's sociology of practice, family capital theory, and intersectionality. The study proposes that the aspiration–achievement paradox is produced by three co-constituting mechanisms. The first is a structurally produced conversion failure, wherein unequal capital distributions prevent participation in the educational field. The second is a bounded compensatory dynamic, wherein families sustain aspiration through non-material investment that confronts irreducible institutional limits. The third is a policy architecture of structured neglect that institutionally reproduces exclusionary conditions. To theorise how Watta youth perceive aspirations and navigate barriers within these mechanisms, the study makes three contributions, namely contextually adaptive habitus, the Bounded Compensatory Family Capital Model, and the field of structured neglect as an analytical framing of policy. Together, these advance a sociologically precise account of how the aspiration-achievement paradox is institutionally produced and historically sustained in postcolonial urban Sri Lanka.

Date of Award	20 Aug 2026
Original language	English
Supervisor	Jane McDonnell (Supervisor), Teresa Crew (Supervisor) & Marcel Stoetzler (Supervisor)