Bringing Bourdieu to ‘widening participation’ policies in higher education: A UK case analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Ainley ◽  
Martin Allen

Whilst widening participation to higher education was approaching New Labour's target of 50% of 18-30s (for women at least), it was presented as a professionalisation of the proletariat but in reality and in hindsight it can be seen to have disguised a proletarianisation of the professions - for which HE supposedly prepares its graduates - with many reduced to para-professions at best. It is argued therefore that education as a whole faces a credibility crunch. However, many have nowhere else to go since without qualifications they face falling into the so-called ‘underclass’ which was widely seen to have manifested itself in the riots of summer 2011. Like other commentators, we point out that the majority of youth did not riot and focus instead upon the children of the new working-middle class who are running up a down-escalator of devalued qualifications. This only intensifies national hysteria about education as the Coalition's reception of Browne's Review restricts competitive academic HE entry to those who can afford tripled fees, while relegating those who cannot to ‘Apprenticeships Without Jobs’ (cf. Finn 1987 ) in FE and private providers. With reference to Allen and Ainley (2011) , this paper speculates as to the likely outcome of this generational crisis.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Byrom

Whilst there has been growing attention paid to the imbalance of Higher Education (HE) applications according to social class, insufficient attention has been paid to the successful minority of working-class young people who do secure places in some of the UK’s leading HE institutions. In particular, the influence and nature of pre-university interventions on such students’ choice of institution has been under-explored. Data from an ESRC-funded PhD study of 16 young people who participated in a Sutton Trust Summer School are used to illustrate how the effects of a school-based institutional habitus and directed intervention programmes can be instrumental in guiding student choices and decisions relating to participation in Higher Education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 100788
Author(s):  
Kaire Kollom ◽  
Kairit Tammets ◽  
Maren Scheffel ◽  
Yi-Shan Tsai ◽  
Ioana Jivet ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheryl Clark ◽  
Anna Mountford-Zimdars ◽  
Becky Francis

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of ‘private good.’ Our analysis situates their ‘risk’ responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out ‘value for money’ in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Rizqy Amelia Zein

In the last two decades, Indonesian higher education system has expanded rapidly in regards to the number of new established institutions and the number of students enrolled in higher education. However, the participation rate within university level is stated as low. In 2016, it only reached 31 percent. It means, although massification has been implemented within higher education system, it is not in line in ensuring equal access to pupils from disadvantaged social groups such as women, lower socio-economic statuses, and students from outer or periphery areas. Rather, it has been evident as a daunting task. Widening participation is not the end of story, since Indonesia should be dealing with another problem which is non-continuation. By performing secondary analysis on several datasets released by World Bank, Indonesian Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education, and Indonesian Statistics Bureau, this paper explores several major findings on accessibility and retention problem of Indonesian higher education.


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