The article presents a retrospective qualitative longitudinal analysis of experiences of education and class amongst three cohorts of Irish people who started out in difficult financial circumstances. It shows how the intersection of education and class-formation in modern Ireland was 'realized' in different historical periods during the twentieth century. Some groups accumulated economic and cultural resources allowing them to convert education to upward social mobility during key periods, whereas others were 'shut out' from the project of the state. We argue that the concept of 'experience', understood as the realization of historically situated macro-sociological processes, provides a useful way of linking agency to structural change, bringing the strengths of macro-sociological quantitative analysis together with those of micro-sociological qualitative analysis within a longer temporal frame.