One of the most widespread misconceptions about young people's experience of university that can be found in the media (see, for example, the UK-based reality series ‘The secret life of students’) is that there is a single ‘student life’ that all young people experience once entering university. As university is considered to be a privileged path of transition, student life is also thought to be a smooth and easy experience. This study doesn't deny that this is the case for some young people, but the experiences are certainly more varied than the narrative of privileged and immature student lives perpetuated by the media. In actual fact, university lives in Europe have never been so diverse, partially as a consequence of the mass expansion of HE, but also because systems of student support have been developed in different ways across Europe, which also makes it difficult to assess who is benefiting and who is losing from entering university. In order to clarify the consequences of this diversity, I conducted several periods of research across six cities in the three different countries, asking young people in university first, to fill in a questionnaire, and second, to participate in face-to-face interviews.

The results of the research show that young people's experiences differ greatly in qualitative terms, with some of them being very different from the widespread image of university as a privileged and smooth path of transition. After illustrating the main aspects of conducting this research across the three countries, using the participants’ own words, this chapter presents the implications of the general condition of protracted semi-dependence experienced by them during university, involving both their finances and their housing situation. It then moves on to discussing the differences among the young people, by illustrating how the five different profiles differ in terms of financial position, housing, wellbeing and education.

Researching young people in university

Part 1 of the book emphasised the need to explore the politics of living while at university, revealing the main challenges regarding young people's lives. After analysing the structures and inequality emerging from the data, it was necessary to actually describe the diversity of the young people's lives, both across their socioeconomic backgrounds and across the countries.