Working-class students in UK higher education

Abstract

This chapter investigates the continuing problem of social class in the age of mass higher education. After a brief overview of the history of social class in higher education, it maps out the contemporary landscape focusing on, but also looking beyond, the statistics. The main part of the chapter highlights the actual experiences of working-class students in UK higher education, drawing on data from two Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) projects of classed experiences of higher education in the twenty-first century. The massification and democratization of higher education have led to the admittance of far more working-class students into universities across the globe, but it has been accompanied by processes of vocationalization and marketization that have diminished the value and status of certain universities and courses relative to others. As a consequence, UK higher education in the 2020s is a steeply hierarchical and stratified system with working-class students, for the most part, clustered in the lower-ranking, poorly resourced institutions and in more vocationally oriented, low-status disciplines.