Our core purpose is advancing knowledge, inspiring people, transforming futures.(2020 Plan, UWE Bristol)Our mission: to pursue and share knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and to help individuals and society fulfil their potential.(Vision and Strategy 2009â2016, University of Bristol)
Higher education (HE) has been much in the news in the past decades. For individuals, it is currently seen as a means of developing a career and getting secure employment. Traditionally, for many young people, especially those from middle-class backgrounds, it has been an enjoyable way to bridge the transition from youth to adulthood; Brake (1980) has used the word âmoratoriumâ to describe this phase, which allows young people to explore and experiment with their identities free from the responsibilities of wage-earning. By society it is currently viewed as a means of identifying and fostering talent to fill professional roles and also as a means of promoting social mobility; in addition, HE professionals are likely to cling to an older vision, where universities have a key humanist mission in equipping individuals and society with the tools of rationality and enlightenment (see for example Docherty 2011; Inglis 2004; Evans 2005), and this transformative agenda seems to be reflected in the mission statements from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) and the University of Bristol (UoB) quoted above. Increasingly, parents believe that their children need a university education to get on in life, and middle-class parents over the past decades have become fearful that without a degree their children will be in danger of downward social mobility (Lareau 2003; Devine 2004). Though working-class parents may not have participated in HE themselves, there is evidence that they, too, see a degree as desirable and hope that their children will continue to HE (Bradley 2015).
In the UK, where our study is located, a university degree has, at least up to the present, been a sound investment. There is a clear âgraduate premiumâ in earnings, which applies especially for women, compared to their non-graduate counterparts (though women continue to earn on average 23 % less than men). Recent analysis by Britton et al. (2015) using a range of datasets (UK government administrative data and Labour Force Survey data) shows that 10 years after graduation women earn three times as much as non-graduate women, while graduate menâs earnings are twice that of non-graduate men. Moreover analysis of the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DeLHE) data by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA 2015) shows that unemployment is lower amongst graduates, running at 8 % six months after graduation and 3 % after three years and six months, although there has been a recent increase in graduates working part-time. As Shamus Rahman Khan puts it in his study of elite schooling in America, âOne of the best predictors of your earnings is your level of education; attending an elite educational institution increases your wages even further. Schooling matters for wealthâ (Khan 2012, p. 7).
Politically, HE can be viewed as an instrument of social justice, or conversely as a tool for elite reproduction. Over the past decades the proportion of children from working-class families attending university has been steadily if slowly increasing, in line with the target set by the UKâs New Labour government (1997â2010) for 50 % of young people to participate in some form of HE by the age of 30. Dorlingâs (2015) analysis of recent admissions data (UCAS 2014), which was published in the Times Higher Education in February 2015, discusses this trend. The data show that between 2009 and 2014 the percentage of English school-leavers who entered university, who were eligible for free school meals (the key proxy for disadvantaged socio-economic background in schools), had risen from 10 to 15 %. Dorling attributes this to their improved performance in GCSE at 16. The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals gaining five good grades (A* to C) rose dramatically between 2005 and 2013 from 18 to 38 %, highlighted as one of the few great recent successes for mobility by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (2014).
This positive trend in HE participation has manifested despite the transfer of the cost of tuition fees to individuals, first introduced by the Labour government in 1998, capped at ÂŁ3000 by Labour in 2004, and then increased to a maximum of ÂŁ9000 under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2012. Large demonstrations by angry young people, including school students, shocked the nation into awareness of these issues during the initial years of the Coalition government. In the year after the imposition of fees, applications did fall, but they have returned to pre-ÂŁ9000 fee levels, although there has been a decline in applications from part-time and mature students, who often originate from working-class communities. In addition, the cap on the number of students that a HE institution can admit has been raised, and the level of acceptances has increased more sharply still. As Dorling points out, this is due to the actions of universities who are keen to amass more fees, and who have subsequently heightened their marketing and outreach activities.
A further trend has been an increase in students from disadvantaged backgrounds being accepted into âeliteâ universities with the highest tariff entrance requirements (in terms of Advanced Level grades). UCAS, the UKâs higher education admissions service, calculated that there had been a 40 % rise in students from the least advantaged areas gaining entry to elite universities between 2011 and 2014 (UCAS 2014). Although this appears on the face of it impressive, Dorling points out that this rise was from an extremely low base, constituting an increase from only 2.3 to 3.2 % of children from the poorest parts of the UK attending the most prestigious universities. They are seven times less likely to do so than their peers from advantaged backgrounds. In some parliamentary constituencies only one in seven, and sometimes only one in ten young people progressed to HE of any kind in 2014. These constituencies include Bristol East and Bristol South, the more disadvantaged areas of the city where our research study was based.
Policy debates have continued to rage about the imposition of increasing levels of fees and the safeguarding of access for the less privileged by means of bursaries. Although the existence of bursaries may have helped to ensure that the trend of working-class participation in HE has not as yet gone into reverse, it should be remembered that tuition fees are only one part of the costs of university. Students must also find funding for accommodation and living costs, which is likely to increase the level of debt with which poorer students are burdened upon finishing their studies. If, subsequently, they find themselves unable to find the well-paid jobs they hoped for, a general climate of disillusionment may develop, with adverse effects on future student recruitment. One of the earliest acts of the UK Conservative Government elected in May 2015 was to abolish the maintenance grants which were available to students from poor backgrounds, to be replaced by further loans. This means that such students, whose families are unable to help them with the costs of food, travel and accommodation, will leave university with an even higher level of debt than the ÂŁ27,000 or ÂŁ36,000 incurred for the payment of fees for their three or four years of undergraduate study.
Since the establishment of the new fees regime and imposition of market values in the HE sector, universities themselves have become fixated on the âstudent experienceâ, since parents and students increasingly demand value for money, given the extent of their investment and the burden of debt students carry. This has subtly altered the relations between lecturers and their students, who have been reconstructed in the vocabulary of HE as âcustomersâ. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, student behaviour may change if they feel they are not getting their âmoneyâs worthâ. Former Vice-Chancellor, Peter Scott, now professor of higher education studies, has argued that the obsession with the student experience is a worrying sign of the commodification of education. Instead of investing in academic staff, universities are increasingly pouring money into new buildings and facilities that they think will attract more students:
Universities, jittery about how they will score in the national student survey, have invested in iconic new student centres, airy atria containing banks of mac [computers] (ideally). They offer more and more âcustomer servicesâ. They do âfeedbackâ to death. (Scott 2015)
Scott suggests that this fixation on such a manufactured type of âexperienceâ may actually stifle the initiative, creativity and independence of students, and that the integrity of education may be challenged when âstudent satisfactionâ becomes the arbiter rather than intellectual rigour. This trend may be heightened by the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), heralded in the 2015 Green Paper on higher education, which will seek to assess teaching and learning performance of universities via standardized measures, such as scores in the National Student Survey or data on student destinations (BIS 2015).
Behind all these debates lies the âelephant in the roomâ: the reality of the impact of class which affects every aspect of peopleâs lives and is inextricably implicated in the workings of the English education system, which can be seen as more or less stratified along class lines. The affluent classes (âdominantâ classes in the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu) send their children to independent private schools, including the historic and ironically named âpublic schoolsâ such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby. The middle-classes manipulate the housing market and take up church attendance to get their children into the best primary schools (often âchurch schoolsâ) and the higher-rated state schools and grammars. Working-class people usually have little choice (despite all the political rhetoric of âparental choiceâ) but to send their children to local state comprehensives, often derogatively referred to as âbog standardâ, a term first used by Labourâs Alistair Campbell in 2001 (Clare and Jones 2001; Northen 2011). The school you attend has a considerable impact on your career opportunities, influencing whether you go on to HE and what type of university you attend. There is a clear status hierarchy amongst the universities, and independent schools are adept at playing the system and getting their pupils into the highest-rated institutions, especially Oxford and Cambridge. This, after all, is why parents are happy to pay the considerable fees charged by these schools.
This book is a study of how those most intimately involved in this nexus of privilege and disadvantage, the undergraduate students, experience the HE system and how that experience is shaped by their class background. It follows the fortunes of a cohort of students at two contrasting universities. How did they get there? What did they do during their years of study? What opportunities, and what problems and obstacles did they encounter, and how did they progress? And at the end of their undergradua...