Abstract
This article uses an analytical framework informed by social geographies to explore the complex relationships between Higher Education Institution, undergraduate student and place. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study exploring the experiences of college-based Higher Education students studying degree courses in Further Education Colleges in England, the article sees student subjectivities as structured through inequalities of institutional positioning in a stratified system as well as through layered local histories of industrial loss. Taken as an instance of undergraduate education in a massified and geographically unequal national context, the findings in this article offer an insight into the contradictory role played by Higher Education in its local area, particularly where a local area is defined by both a lack of and a need for increased educational opportunity.
Highlights
In seeming contradiction to the global trend towards massified Higher Education (HE) systems (Marginson, 2016) in which Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) compete globally for reputation, research funding and student numbers, there is increased attention to localised inequalities of access to Higher Education. This discursive contradiction between global and local is reconcilable according to the logic of massification; as access to HE has become expected for more students, it has become expected from and in more places
This article has argued that, as both massification and stratification of HE continue in nations like England, there is increasing need to consider the relationship between institutions of HE and their local environments
The findings presented here build on existing literature in two interrelated ways
Summary
In seeming contradiction to the global trend towards massified Higher Education (HE) systems (Marginson, 2016) in which Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) compete globally for reputation, research funding and student numbers, there is increased attention to localised inequalities of access to Higher Education (see, for example, Alloway and Dalley-Trim, 2009; Macintyre and Macdonald, 2011). This discursive contradiction between global and local is reconcilable according to the logic of massification; as access to HE has become expected for more students, it has become expected from and in more places. The article provides both an analytical framework and a significant argument for the salience of attention to the local, despite and because of the increasing discursive power of the global in HE
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