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From Scholar to Delivery Worker? Career Aspirations and Employment Realities of Bangladeshi Master’s Students in Finland

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study focuses how Bangladeshi master’s students in Finland experience and make sense of the gap between their career aspirations and their employment realities. Many Bangladeshi students arrive in Finland with strong academic records, scholarships, and high ambitions of becoming researchers, university lecturers, policy analysts, or other white-collar professionals, understanding their migration as a strategic investment in upward mobility. For many, however, the reality of employment proves to be a disappointment. Despite their qualifications, a significant number of them find themselves excluded from desired professional roles and channelled into low-paid and low-status work in cleaning, food service, and delivery. The distance between what these graduates were promised and what they encounter forms the central concern of this study. The research draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, field, habitus, and symbolic violence to analyse this trajectory from scholarly ambition to survival employment. It pursues three questions: which career aspirations participants held upon arriving in Finland, which employment experiences they have had, and how they explain and make sense of the gap between the two. Methodologically, the study uses in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirteen Bangladeshi students and graduates of master's programmes at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku, drawn from a range of fields including social sciences, computer science, microbiology, and English studies. By conducting narrative analysis, participants’ career-journey accounts are read for narratives that recur across the sample while retaining attention to the temporal and causal structure of each account. The findings reveal that the aspiration-outcome gap is not a product of individual failure or cultural mismatch but emerges through the systematic interaction between individual habitus and the structural characteristics of the Finnish employment field. Participants arrived carrying a scholarly habitus shaped through academic achievement, family investment, and representations of Finland as a meritocratic destination. On entering the labour market, they experience capital devaluation operating through multiple reinforcing mechanisms: language requirements deployed as flexible screening criteria, a reference economy in which most positions are filled through internal recruitment, and an ethnic hierarchy of access that disadvantages non-European applicants. This devaluation reached even when acquired Finnish qualifications, indicating that the field evaluates the embodied characteristics of certain social capital holders rather than cultural capital alone. Faced with exclusion, participants entered survival employment that demanded a thoughtful reconstruction of professional identity. Their sense-making varied rather than depending on a single pattern, ranging from sophisticated structural attribution through mixed frameworks to the internalisation of exclusion as personal failure, explaining how symbolic violence produces varied rather than uniform responses. The study contributes empirically as in-depth qualitative research of this nationally specific population, theoretically by adapting Bourdieusian concepts to a new context and studying how capital devaluation operates across distinct fields, and on the policy front by highlighting the incoherence between Finland’s active enrolment of international talent and the structures that exclude such talent after reaching Finland. Ultimately, it shows that the distance between scholar and delivery worker is not a matter of individual worth but the existence of structural exclusion in the society.
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212104382
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