Personal Life, Young Women and Higher Education

A Relational Approach to Student and Graduate Experiences

Kirsty Finn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137319739
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

The experience of higher education in the UK has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the 21st century. This book explores the emotional and moral significance of the relationships young women develop at university, such as friends, family and housemates, by using a seven-year qualitative longitudinal study of the transitional period.

1

Introduction

Anna’s story

I sit and wait in a very noisy coffee shop in an affluent suburb of a Northern English city. I clasp a lukewarm cappuccino and wait for Anna to arrive. It is five years since we last met and I’m anxious that I’ll no longer recognise her. The field notes from 2006–7, when she was last interviewed, document her changing hair colour; it changed three times over the course of that year so I’m not sure what to expect. Then, in she walks. I spot her instantly. Her hair is long and blonde this time and her casual, student clothing of hoodies and jeans has been replaced by a mature and corporate style of dress. Anna takes a seat opposite me and as she does so she apologises for coming to the interview straight from work. She is visibly harried and nervous: ‘Is it too noisy here?’ she asks, ‘Has it really been five years?’ Soon we slip into an easy familiarity and, as the conversation begins to flow, I switch on the voice recorder.

Anna graduated in 2010 with a first-class honours degree in a Business-related subject. She studied at a Russell Group institution in the Northern city where we now sit, struggling to hear one another over the noise of the coffee machine and lively chatter that surrounds us. Anna has only recently returned to live in the city; during the two years since she completed her degree she has moved back and forth between her family’s home in Millthorne in the North West of England and rental properties within the same region. She is glad to be back in her old stomping ground. It’s taken Anna much longer than she’d hoped but eventually, after securing a role within her field, she found house-share accommodation on the internet and took up residence in her university-city once again.

This is Anna’s third job in two years and is ostensibly a promotion albeit in a smaller company than she is used to. After graduating, Anna was offered a full-time paid position within the company where she had been an intern during a 12-month industrial placement undertaken between years two and three of her degree. Anna chose the placement on the basis of the company’s size (large and international) and also because the head office is located about forty miles away from her family home in Millthorne. Thus, during her internship year she returned to live at home with her family and when the time came to leave university for good she made similar arrangements. When Anna returned to Millthorne in 2010, however, only her mother and younger brother (17 years old) were living in the family home. Her father had recently moved out following her parents’ separation and her younger sister (19 years old) was living away at university. Anna reflects on this period with a sense of gratitude; a graduate job within her preferred industry had seemed out of reach when the recession hit and many of her friends had not had the same experiences. More than this though, she was grateful of the ways the move back to Millthorne allowed her to ‘be there’ for her mother and brother during a time of transition for the whole family.

You know, to land that job in, like a recession, well I was very lucky, fortunate. Grateful, I was really grateful. I know without [the placement] I wouldn’t have landed it. It made really good sense for me to take it and be close to family again. Things had been really wobbly and I wanted to be around, check everyone was ok, you know. It hadn’t been easy for any of them and I felt so far away. My brother, he’s a young lad, but he was, well he struggled a bit. (Interview 4)

The motif of luck and gratitude was an ever-present theme throughout Anna’s four interviews which took place between 2006 and 2012. During this period in which she made the transition from post-16 further education to graduate employment, Anna often made sense of her experiences through a narrative of being in the ‘right place at the right time’. From the formation of friendships and securing her work placement to finding a suitable house-share as a young professional, Anna was reluctant to champion her own capabilities and preferred instead to speak of luck and happenstance. Anna was the first within her family to study at university; however her sister and brother later followed in this pathway. Her mother works as a nurse and her father is self-employed. The family moved from the Midlands to Millthorne when Anna was ten years old, relocating as a result of her father’s change in employment. Although initially she missed her extended family, Anna quickly settled in to her new life in Millthorne and made several good friends at Local High School where she remained to study her A Levels. Moving away from these friendships to attend university brought feelings of sadness; after all they had taken care of her when she was new and in a strange place. Nevertheless, Anna was also bolstered by her previous success at starting again and making new friends and she was confident in her unbounded luck: ‘I always seem to land on my feet so I’m not worried really. I’ve done it once so I can do it again, I know I can’ (Interview 1).

During her first interview Anna unashamedly declared herself to be a ‘Daddy’s girl’. They had a strong and close relationship that occasionally her mother felt excluded from. The transition to a university located over 100 miles away from home engendered a shift in this dynamic, however, and provided new opportunities for Anna and her mother to feel close. Her parents visited her in her new home and Anna reflected on the ways in which geographical distance brought a sense of emotional closeness to her relationship with her mother: ‘I guess we’re just too alike. At home she would drive me nuts; really get under my skin. But I was so pleased to see her and she’s, well she’s a lovely lady and I do love her so much’ (Interview 2). Anna’s good fortune at making friends extended to university and she developed close ties with other young women on her corridor in the university halls of residence where she lived. She acknowledged that these young women had, at first, seemed quite different to the ‘Millthorne Girls’ with whom she was friends at home. Nevertheless, these relationships flourished despite their differences in outlook and interests. To her surprise, she found the space and means to manage old and new friendships simultaneously and across distances.

Anna’s main concern was always that there would be a break in her studies after the second year when she would begin her industrial placement. It did not spoil her experiences but she was aware that the good friends she had made at university would experience their final year without her and that she would have to branch out and find others with whom to move forward. Indeed, Anna was cautiously aware of her future and her decision to undertake a degree with a 12-month work placement was part of this pre-emptive diligence. When she returned to university to study her final year Anna met her current partner. Although older than Anna, he came to university as a mature student and was only just completing the first year of his degree when they established a relationship. Anna explained that she had always planned to take up the offer of a job at the company where she worked as an intern, but her new relationship brought added emotional ties to the North East and this complicated things. In the end she stuck to her initial arrangement and their relationship became long-distance for a while until she returned to the Northern city in 2012. Although Anna’s ideas about the future included marriage, a family and a career that she enjoyed, in the short term a move North offered her the opportunity to cultivate a lifestyle that she felt was appropriate for a young woman in her early twenties, before settling down.

I felt like I had unfinished business here; still loads of living to do. Living [in Millthorne] was fine for a while but my life was dominated by travel every weekday then travel at the weekend too, to see [her partner]. I was knackered. And, well there’s no, like, ‘scene’ in Millthorne. Nobody’s, like, meeting for an after-work wine. Where would you go, Wetherspoons? Don’t think so. Up here I feel I can have the lifestyle that I was missing out on before I’m older and settled and all that. (Interview 4)

Anna’s most recent move came at a point when the situation between her parents had levelled out. Her mother had begun a new relationship, however, this came to an end shortly before Anna was due to move out and she was clearly still anxious about family at home: ‘She’s okay. She met a man friend but they’re not together anymore which is a shame because that always made me feel better, no one likes to think about [their parents] being on their own.’ Thus, Anna’s post-university experiences revealed a complex negotiation of support for kin and family at home, strategic career decisions and the maintenance of friendships and a new and significant intimate relationship. What is more, her peer-shared house, the after-work drinks and corporate lifestyle allowed her to see a new side to her student city. Time and space were therefore pivotal to her reflections and central to the ways in which she was able to make sense of change in her own life.

it takes a little while to get over the university thing, the experience. It’s not instant. I don’t live my life any more maturely [now] than I did then. Like tonight I’ll probably just get into bed and watch TV. I remember seeing like one of my friend’s sisters after she finished uni and I was like ... ‘Oh, my god, she’s like 22!’ So now I’m like, I’m 24 now and I haven’t got a clue. (Interview 4)

The mingling of everyday, banal experiences of time with more general reflection on life-course and aging emerged as a coping mechanism; a way of ordering and rationalising change. The unfolding of time was always there, always present, bringing new emotional dimensions to personal relationships, self-identity and the broader experience of transition.

Relational transitions

Anna’s story is one of 24 accounts of change and transition which form the basis of this book about young women’s personal lives during and after completion of higher education (HE) in the UK. Anna’s story illuminates the significance of relational connections to family, friends and different locales, the everyday negotiations that underpin these and the ways in which personal relationships overlap and interfere with ostensibly ‘public’ experiences of work, education and mobility. Anna’s story, and indeed the 23 others generated during the seven-year qualitative longitudinal (QL) study, provides a window into the project of massification which has transformed the UK HE sector over the past 30 years, illuminating in particular the personal and relational dimensions of this. Writing in 1999, Sue Heath argued that the expansion of HE strongly relates to the ways in which intimacy is being transformed and the increasingly diverse ways in which personal life is conducted (p. 553, cited in Willmot 2007: 463). In the fifteen years that have passed since then, there have been only a few studies within HE research that have begun to unpack the relationship between ‘going to university’ and young people’s broad experiences of intimacy. The QL study presented in the coming chapters aims to rebalance the debate about young women’s experiences of HE and bring issues of intimacy and personal life to the centre.

Before I outline the aims and scope of this book, I want to first acknowledge the breadth of research to which this volume contributes and seeks to extend. Research which explores the UK HE sector has made significant inroads in understanding the complexities of access and participation (Archer and Hutchings 2001; Archer, Pratt and Phillips 2001; Archer, Hutchings and Ross 2003; Reay 2003), decision-making (Brooks 2002, 2004, 2005; Reay, David and Ball 2005; Evans 2009; Holdsworth 2006), the experiences of first-generation entrants (Thomas and Quinn 2007) and working-class students studying within elite institutions (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2009, 2010; Crozier et al. 2008). In more general discussions of the changing landscape of UK HE, scholars have illuminated the apparent contradictions underpinning recent transformations (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003; Blanden and Machin 2004; Callender 2003a, 2003b; Callender and Jackson 2008; Furlong and Cartmel 2009; Roberts, K. 2010; Tight 2012) revealing HE as a process through which class advantage is maintained and reproduced rather than explicitly challenged or dismantled. Leathwood and Read (2009) add further to this important critique of massification, exploring the apparent ‘feminization’ of HE internationally and the implications of this for men and women, and for the project of social justice.

These arguments about social justice, inequality and social mobility have not only impacted the ways in which the current study was first imagined and later developed, but they have become characteristic of the tone and direction of HE research in the UK. That is, these studies have produced a language through which HE students’ lives are investigated, described and discussed, usually in terms of the barriers and facilitators to entry. Equally, as students exit HE the focus is again on access and participation this time within the labour market. Several studies have sought to map the effects of a rapidly expanding HE sector upon the graduate jobs market (Brown and Hesketh 2004; Brynin 2002; Chevalier and Lindley 2007; Green and Zhu 2010; Moreau and Leathwood 2006) and graduate experiences are subsequently understood within a rather narrow lexicon of underemployment, over-education and employability. These are worthy interests; however, what is lost within these debates about students and graduates is a sense of the young person as relational, emotional and embedded in a broad constellation of meaningful and intentional experiences.

The aim of this book is, therefore, to broaden the academic gaze of HE research in order to make visible a much wider range of connections, experiences and affective processes. The personal lives of young women are often central to how they orient themselves towards HE and yet the everyday dynamics and practices that underpin and sustain relational connections are assumed and taken for granted in scholarly accounts of transition. Indeed, relationships with family and friends, peers and partners are considered to be background determinants of things such as: choice (or lack thereof) (Christie 2007, 2009; Holdsworth 2009; Hussain and Bagguley 2007); retention and/or student withdrawal (Christie, Munro and Fisher 2004; Wilcox, Wynn and Fyvie-Gauld 2005); and feelings of social exclusion or alienation (Palmer, O’Kane and Owens 2009; Keane 2011). Such a focus on personal relationships as constituting ‘risks or resources’ for young women in higher education does little to unpack the dynamic nature of those relationships and how change is managed in everyday contexts. Consequently, the aim of this book is to foreground the everyday negotiations of personal life and to illuminate the process of relating and how this shifts across time. This requires a different analytical approach and a new orientation to writing about young lives. It is only through such an approach that the emotional and sometimes very messy experiences of personal life can be fully appreciated and kept intact.

Telling stories

I began this chapter with Anna’s story because telling stories is a key concern of this book. In my description of Anna’s transition out of home, and back again, I present a picture of Anna as a particular person with a history, a set of connections, obligations and emotions and a sense of self as lucky and laid back, yet always planning for the future. This vignette makes it possible to read Anna’s experiences as far more than a set of choices and outcomes relating to HE. She becomes more than a collection of risks or resources, barriers and opportunities, traditional or non-traditional in her actions and intentions. Telling Anna’s story in this way thus enables the reader to regard her experiences as vital and dynamic, unfolding in time and space. Following others who have privileged depth and detail in sociological writing about youth transitions (Henderson et al. 2007; Thomson 2009), it is through the telling of stories like Anna’s that I hope to capture ‘something of the character and feel of contemporary youth that goes beyond and beneath what is possible when working on a larger canvas’ (Thomson 2009: 3).

The discussion presented in this book moves away from established and institutionalised forms of sociological writing. In The Art of Listening (2007) Les Back offers a critique of sociological research methods and writing and calls upon those working within the discipline to reinvigorate their engagement with the social world and reflect on their place within it (p.2). Back’s manifesto is part of a broader movement within sociology that has gathered pace in recent years. This movement questions the limits and possibilities of traditional sociology, specifically its modes of research and writing, to convey the realities that people encounter every day (Back 2007; Kelly 2011; Law 2004; Law and Mol 2006; Smart 2007, 2009). Moreover, it offers new directions within the two fields of study that I seek to synthesise in this book. For example, writing about relationships and personal life, Carol Smart (2009: 296) has argued against modes of representation which flatten real lives onto the page and rob them of a ‘great deal of expression and non-verbal communication.’ Elsewhere within the field of youth studies, Peter Kelly (2015) has warned of the ways in which the pursuit of ‘evidence’ (of increased agency or the persistence of structured inequalities in young lives) encourages scholars to take young people’s narratives too literally.

This critique, or perhaps this troubling of institutionalised ways of knowing young lives and their relational connections, has been significant in shaping the QL study and the ways it is presented in the following chapters. The design of the study, and the subsequent analysis and writing, has been developed in ways that seek to capture and retain the vitality of the experiences that the young women shared over the course of their involvement in the project. A central concern was to preserve the dignity of their lives whilst illuminating their pleasures and pains, their hopes and dreams, as well as their setbacks and losses (Devine 2010: 155) within a broad constellation of personal relationships and connections. As Anna’s story reveals, As Anna’s story reveals, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Higher Education and Personal Life: A Relational Approach
• 3  Disentangling Family Relationships
• 4  Friendship in Higher Education: Imagined, Embodied, Negotiated
• 5  Peer-shared Intimacy, Love and Sexuality
• 6  Supporting New Graduates: Sustaining and Troubling Intergenerational Ties
• 7  Graduate Narratives of Success and (Im) mobility
• 8  Conclusion
• Appendix: Information about the Sixth Forms and Colleges
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index