Abstract
Ten years after the global crisis of 2008, higher education (HE) in its neoliberal form faces a wide range of challenges. Financialisation and marketisation have continued to erode a workplace culture previously based on collegiality and public service; instead, staff and students alike are assumed to be motivated primarily by the hope of monetary gain and the fear of job insecurity for staff and social exclusion for students. This important collection of research essays demonstrates effectively how in that context, the idea that HE is a powerful agent of social mobility and equality of opportunity is a convenient myth that obscures its true role, which is exactly the opposite: to reproduce the social hierarchy of wealth and power that lies at the heart of capitalism.
The book is divided into three sections of four essays each, dealing in turn with the admissions process, student experiences and employment outcomes. Although there are illustrative tables and graphs throughout, the main approach is via qualitative research, especially interviews with students, staff and employers. All varieties of UK HE are covered, including unusually an essay on HE access courses at further education colleges. The 12 contributions are summarised in turn in the editorial introduction and a conclusion by David James that summarises the main findings.
In Part I on access to HE, Susan Coulson et al. look at how students from different class backgrounds ‘fit in’ at élite universities. The reduction of ‘class’ to measurable indicators of socio-economic circumstances means that more subtle factors of cultural difference in their communities of origin are not adequately appreciated or acted upon, nor indeed even regarded as questions of class. Hugh Busher and Nalita James examine the specific issues faced by non-traditional mature entrants, who mostly come via access courses put on by further education colleges. They find that such students face great obstacles in their struggle to gain qualifications that will lead to more fulfilling and financially secure lives. Existing institutions are unable to help sufficiently because of conflicting goals and lack of resources, leaving mature students to rely too heavily on family and community support. Vikki Boliver’s detailed analysis of admissions data suggests that admission outcomes are reasonably meritocratic in the narrow sense of correlating with achieved qualifications, contextual factors that make it harder for individual disadvantaged students to achieve the entry level are still not properly taken into account. Neil Harrison provides a useful survey of trends in admissions policy, practice and outcomes with regard to students from various backgrounds. In response to concerns about the relative exclusion of ‘disadvantaged’ young people, the government, HE institutions and supporting media have focused on their lack of qualifications and reluctance to apply for the top universities, while investing substantial resources (up to £500m in 2000–2016) into both access as such, and forms of remediation after admittance. Taking into account the inadequacies of available data, he concludes that while lower status universities have increased their HE participation from disadvantaged groups, élite universities have not done so.
In Part II, Diane Reay reports on a study of working-class students’ experiences in one élite and one post-1992 university. Having already separated themselves from their peers at school, those attending the former were able to take advantage of the superior resources available and continued to excel; those at the latter were more likely to be working part-time, have continuing parental responsibilities and less access to support at university, and as a result did less well. Matthew Cheeseman’s ethnographic research into Sheffield’s ‘studentland’ focuses on the role played by commercialised night-life in the socialisation of students. They make friends according to the places and spaces they frequent, and this in turn generates divisions between affluent and mobile students studying at the University of Sheffield, more local students at Sheffield Hallam, and international students who take little part in night-life. Berenice Scandone studies the experience of women of Bangladeshi origin in HE, who have the double disadvantage of ethnicity and class; they find it easier to ‘fit in’ at lower-status institutions with higher proportions of UK-domiciled ethnic minority students, thereby internalising the dominant discourse that equates ‘white’ with ‘bright’. Finally, Vicky Mountford charts the ways in which clothing brands shape the ‘look’ of middle-class ‘rah’ students as distinct from their less affluent counterparts.
The Part III examines the links between social class and graduate destinations. Gerbrand Tholen and Phillip Brown question whether the drive to improve employability actually meets the needs of the labour market, especially in the context of students expecting that high fees will secure well-paid jobs. Employability is treated as an attribute of individuals based on their skills and knowledge, with little attention to the actual patterns of labour demand. Lack of demand since the 2008 crisis leads to intensified competition among graduates, in which those with a high-income and/or higher-class background will tend to succeed; it also leads to the ‘graduatisation’ of ‘lower-skill’ jobs. Paul Wakeling looks at access to postgraduate study, the completion of which remains a reliable source of higher pay and job security. He finds that socio-economic background impacts less on postgraduate entry than undergraduate, apart from delayed entry which is significantly easier for those able to draw on family resources. Will Hunt and Peter Scott look at the vexed question of internships, in this case among creative and media graduates. They find that unpaid internships are even more prevalent than expected, that it is only paid internships that confer advantages in employability, and that ‘participation in internships, especially paid ones, remains moulded by social class’ (p. 204). Harriet Bradley and Richard Waller round off Part II with a wide-ranging review on the impact of class and gender on the transition to employment. They find that well-qualified aspirational working-class young people can indeed gain social mobility from higher education, the extent of that gain is much greater if they have studied at an elite university. As for gender, it remains the case that women graduates are more likely to abandon early aspirations to high-status and high-paid jobs, or indeed to pursue jobs with a social purpose rather than status and money.
As David James notes in his brief concluding chapter, HE policy long ago departed from the ‘humanistic’ motives still present in the 1963 Robbins Report, in favour of purely economic motives at the level of the ‘national economy’ as well as the individual. Yet, sociological research continues to expose the ways in which higher education reproduces social differentiation and economic inequality, rather than simply being unequivocally good for everyone. This tendency will have been reinforced by the most recent ‘reforms’, which have accentuated the role of market competition, notably by removing caps on student numbers.
With my limited knowledge of sociology (2 years of academic study in the 1960s), I was struck by the meticulous specification in these essays of the researchers’ sources and methods. Less impressive was the uniformity of their reliance on Bourdieu in their theoretical framing of that research. At a stroke, it seems clear; Bourdieu’s adoption of the ideas of human, social and cultural capital has outlawed any consideration of class as a conflictual relationship, rather than a mere categorisation of citizens by occupation, income and cultural ‘habitus’. While there is an abundance of hostile remarks about ‘marketisation’, there is no attempt to construct a critique of the dominant neoliberal ideology that underpins the changes in HE over the last 30 years. At a more practical level, any consideration of how we might, as a society, challenge the myths of equal access and meritocratic outcomes surely requires us to extend the field of inquiry from education as such to the world of employment to which education is supposed to deliver an appropriately graded labour force. As long as extreme hierarchies of pay and status are accepted as a natural feature of the social division of labour, sociologists of education can do little more than to chart the continuing hypocrisies of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the copy-editing of this volume was not up to scratch, with a lot of typos and missing words.