Does the Adult Majority Create New Patterns of Student Life? Some Experiences of Swedish Higher Education

Abstract

So much for 60 years ago. Going still further back in time, we find that education and university studies have always been reserved for the few. Plato's Academy was unmistakeably linked with the aristocracy of the time. Its pupils did not include women and slaves. The early Swedish universities recruited most of their students from the aristocracy, but also from the burgesses of the towns and the land-owning classes. Students were admitted at a far more tender age than is now the practice. For example, there were cases of aristocratic 10-year-olds being enrolled at Uppsala University during the seventeenth century. Between 15 and 20% of the students, however, were the sons of farmers a very high figure by international standards and so university studies became an important factor of social mobility [2]. It should be borne in mind, however, that throughout the eighteenth century, the nonnoble agrarian class and the landless rural and urban proletariat comprised more than 90% of Sweden's population. The middle class existing at the end of the 18th