Sociology Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 855–874. Printed in the United Kingdom © 2001 BSA Publications Limited
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice? Class,
‘Race’ and the Higher Education Choice Process
Diane Reay, Jacqueline Davies, Miriam David and Stephen J Ball
School of Social St Bartholomew School
Science & Public of Nursing & Midwifery,
Policy, King’s
City University
College London
Dept. of Education
Keele University
Inst. of Education
King’s College
London
A B S T R AC T This paper draws on data from an on-going ESRC project on choice of higher
education. It focuses primarily on the experiences of non-traditional applicants to higher
education. Although these students are not typical of the entire university entry cohort,
their narratives raise important issues in relation to race, class and higher education choice
processes. These ‘success stories’ reveal important causes for concern as well as reasons for
celebration. In particular, their experiences of the choice process are qualitatively different
from those of their more privileged middle-class counterparts, highlighting key class and
racial differences and inequalities.
K EY WO R D S
choice, ethnicity, higher education, social class.
Introduction
This paper concentrates on the higher education choice processes of a
specific segment of higher education applicants; young and mature students who as
recently as ten years ago would have been very unlikely to be applying to university.
In particular, it focuses on how class and ‘race’ issues interrelate in their decisionmaking. The paper explores both how the students negotiate the process and
attempts to understand the meanings they ascribe to higher education, and,
specifically, the divisions within it. The paper also examines, through the students’
accounts, various mechanisms of social closure which operate to reproduce existing
inequalities within the higher education sector. In doing so the paper challenges
contemporary political discourses which position widening access and the advent of
a mass system of higher education as unproblematically positive advances.
The historical background
Egerton and Halsey (1993) identify three major aspects of the history of access
to higher education over the twentieth century. Firstly, it has been a period of
considerable expansion; secondly, there has been a significant reduction in gender
inequality; and, thirdly, there has been no reduction in relative social class inequality.
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Before the Second World War university education was the preserve of a small elite.
In 1938 less than 2 per cent of the relevant age cohort were attending universities and
among women the percentage was less than 0.5 (Blackburn and Jarman 1993). By
1948 the proportion of the 18-year-old population entering universities was still only
3.7 per cent. However, while the proportion of women attending universities has
slowly risen over the post-war period until it has now reached parity with men
(HESA 1998),1 social class differences in access have remained far more intractable.
From 1928 to 1947 8.9 per cent of all boys from non-manual backgrounds entered
university compared to 1.4 per cent of all boys from manual backgrounds (Glass
1954). Halsey et al.’s (1980) comparison of access trends before and after the war
suggests that the immediate post-war situation had become even more skewed in
class terms than that existing before the war. However, the introduction of meanstested grants and the provision of full fees in 1960 (Anderson 1960), plus the Robbins
Report’s (1963) endorsement of the principle that university education should be
available to all those with the ability and qualifications to benefit provided the policy
background for a rapid expansion. There was a rise of 50 per cent in university
entrance between 1963 and 1968, and by 1989 the number of university entrants had
risen by 150 per cent. Yet, despite this enormous growth, class differentials in higher
education have remained fairly constant (Blackburn and Jarman 1993; Gillon 1999).
Just as Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) found in the French university sector, there is a
persistent overrepresentation of middle-class students.
Although the Anderson and Robbins policies were followed by a decline in class
inequalities, from 1970 to 1980 there was an increase in inequality as class advantage
proved crucial in the heightened competition resulting from the growth in demand.
After that we have had a continual expansion of university places. In 1996, the firsttime participation rates in higher education in Britain exceeded 33 per cent. This is an
enormous shift since the 1960s when rates were below 10 per cent (OECD 1998).
However, by the end of the century there had only been a tiny decline in class
inequality. Blackburn and Jarman point to the increasing significance of universities
in the class structure and argue (1993:205)that:
Central to this change is the way university degrees have become so much more
important as criteria for job placement. When degrees were held by less than 2% of the
labour force, they may have been extremely important for the careers of the qualified men
and women but they were too rare to have a major impact on the labour market as a
whole. As the number of graduates have grown the degree has become an increasingly
common entry qualification for a growing number of high-level occupations. Thus,
higher education has played a progressively greater part in the reproduction of the
occupationally based class structure. So it is not surprising that class inequalities have
persisted. Nor is it surprising that class differentials among women are just as marked as
they are among men.
The situation throughout the twentieth century, then, has been one of a strong
class differential among both men and women in which social class effects have
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
neither been alleviated nor accentuated by gender (Egerton and Halsey 1993; Halsey
1993).
As Lesley Pugsley points out, ‘there are class inequalities involved in making
decisions about higher education which have persisted for the 40 years since Jackson
and Marsden’s 1962 study’ (1998:85). And significantly the differences in class
recruitment to higher education persist even when entry requirements are taken into
account. Data from the Youth Cohort survey of 1993 found that while 77 per cent of
children from social classes I and II with two A levels or equivalent went on to higher
education, the proportion for social classes IV and V was only 47 per cent (Metcalf
1997). Since then policy changes initiated in 1997 have made it more, not less, difficult
for young people from lower social classes to attend university and this is borne out
by the statistics:
Analysis of 1997 to 1998 data highlight large decreases in accepted applicants within those
age, socio-economic and ethnic groupings which were the primary focus of the widening
participation initiative.
[UCAS 1999:8]
The inequalities arising from lack of information and general perplexity and
confusion about post-compulsory education among Jackson and Marsden’s
working class families of forty years ago have, in the new Labour era, been
compounded by the introduction of fees and loans and the abolition of maintenance
grants.
Since Jackson and Marsden’s study the class landscape of Britain has changed
radically. The old binary between working class and middle class has never explained
enough about the myriad ways in which social class is acted out in people’s lives. Even
Jackson and Marsden wrote about different groupings within their working-class
category. Thirty-eight per cent of their working-class sample were described as
‘sunken middle class’. Similarly, current research indicates that it is important to
disaggregate crude class categorisations and develop more subtle analyses which
recognise rather than gloss over increasing horizontal and vertical segmentation
within class groupings (Savage et al. 1992; Power 1998). However, while the increasing
complexities of class positionings signal the need for more sophisticated, nuanced
analyses they do little to allieviate continuing class inequities. In 1998 the class
participation rate of the three lowest social classes had fallen from 22.1 in 1997 to 21.3
per cent, while the class participation rate for social classes I, II and III Non-Manual
rose from 51.8 to 55.8 per cent (Gillon 1999).
Amongst the preoccupation with gender and class within research into higher
education access in Britain, the operations of ‘race’ and ethnicity have been largely
neglected. The work of Paul Taylor in the early 1990s emphasized dissimilarities in
the experience of disadvantage across different minority ethnic groupings, whilst
stressing the continuing importance of class and gender (Taylor 1992; 1993). More
recently a range of studies have emerged which focus on ethnicity (Bird 1996;
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Modood and Shiner 1994; Modood and Acland 1998). What these studies consistently stress is that, despite their less advantaged parental occupational profile,
‘most minority groups are producing greater proportions of applications and
admissions to higher education than the rest of the population’ (Modood and
Acland 1998:37). However, the most recent statistics for home students generate some
cause for concern. Between 1997 and 1998 the majority of ethnic groups showed
increases in applicants accepted for degree courses but there were a number which
had declined. The white category fell by 3.37 per cent but black Caribbean and black
African applicants fell by nearly twice as much; 6.01 and 6.75 per cent respectively.
Also, as we suggest later, the aggregate patterns of entry of ethnic and class groups tell
only part of the story of inequalities in higher education. Attention also needs to be
given to the distribution of entries. Here evidence to date indicates a troubling racial
divide between the old and new sectors of higher education (Mirza 1998) in which
students of Caribbean origin are overrepresented by 43 per cent in new universities,
Asians by 162 per cent and Africans by 223 per cent.
In contemporary Britain, with the transition from elite to majority system,
higher education is going through the process of increased stratification that
Bourdieu (1988) describes in relation to France. Instead of a system underpinned by
relatively straight forward class-based inclusion and exclusion, we now have a far
more differentiated field of higher education (Collins 1999a). There is a political
rhetoric of widening access, achievement-for-all and meritocratic equalisation
within mass higher education. Yet changes in the scale and scope of higher
education, however significant these may be, should not distract attention from the
continuing and developing forms of social stratification within higher education.
While more working-class and minority students are entering university, for the
most part they are entering different universities to their middle-class counterparts.
Furthermore the expansion of higher education has been of greatest benefit to the
offspring of the middle classes. The class differentials in age-partipation rates in
higher education have increased (Gillon 1999).
At the turn of the century there are apparent reasons for both optimism and
pessimism regarding greater equality in access to higher education. There has been
an enormous expansion over the last decade, opening up higher education to groups
of young and mature people who would not have previously considered doing a
degree. At the same time, the ending of the binary divide in British higher education,
whilst negating traditional distinctions between institutions, has fostered the
emergence of a new hierarchy of institutions in which prestigious research
universities have emerged as a top layer of elite institutions. And it is these universities which remain overwhelmingly white and middle-class in composition
(HEFCE 2000; Lampyl 2000). The abolition of maintenance grants and the
introduction of fees and loans as a policy is still in its infancy and it remains to be
seen if a sizeable proportion of students will be deterred from applying to higher
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
education as a consequence, and if so, whether there will be a differential impact on
the basis of gender, ‘race’ or class. Recent research (Hesketh 1999) suggests that
students’ financial experiences are shaped by a combination of cultural and
economic capital, implicating both class and ‘race’.
It is against this background of national trends in relation to gender, ‘race’, class
and higher education, an expanding mass higher education system and increasing
differentiation within both the middle and working classes that our research is being
conducted.
The research study
Our research study on choice of higher education (award no. R000 23 7431)
focuses upon two cohorts of student ‘choosers’, their parents and various intermediaries (careers teachers, sixth form tutors etc.) in six educational institutions; an
11–18 mixed comprehensive with a large minority working-class intake (Creighton
Community School – CCS) and a comprehensive sixth-form consortium which
serves a socially diverse community (Maitland Union – MU), a tertiary college with a
very large A-level population (Riverway College – RC), a further education college
which runs higher education Access courses (Fennister FE College – FFEC), and two
prestigious private schools, one single-sex boys (Cosmopolitan Boys – CB), one
single-sex girls (Hemsley Girls – HG). All the institutions are in or near to London.
Our research is institutionally located in this way so that we are able to explore
the effects of individual, peer group, familial and institutional influences and
processes in choice-making. The extremely diverse nature of the institutions also
allows us to examine the access and choice-making processes for very different
groups of students in terms of class background and ethnicity. However, the primary
focus of this paper is specifically non-traditional entrants to university and their
perspectives on the higher education process. Whilst we recognise that higher
education applicants are located within a matrix of influences which are best
represented by overlapping circles of individual, family, friends and institution,
school, peer and family influences are not directly engaged with in this paper. Length
constraints prohibit in-depth exploration and consequently these areas are
specifically addressed in other project papers (Ball et al. 2001 forthcoming; Reay et al.
2001a, b).
To date we have administered a questionnaire to 502 year 12, year 13 and further
education (FE) students; run focus groups and interviewed a sub-sample of fiftythree students in Creighton Community School, Fennister FE College, Maitland
Union and Cosmopolitan Boys; interviewed various intermediaries in these
institutions, and interviewed a small sample of parents. The following analysis is
based on the qualitative interviews although we draw on the quantitative database
when examining labour market participation. These qualitative interviews are not
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representative of the sample as a whole in as much that FFEC and CCS have much
larger numbers of working-class students than do the other institutions, while the
students interviewed at Maitland Union were predominantly the first generation in
their families to apply to university.
In the discussion which follows the term middle-class refers to students from
families in groups I and II of the Registrar General’s social class groupings, workingclass refers to students from families in groups III Manual, IV and V. The intermediate group (group III Non-Manual) is not discussed here. As indicated above the
qualitative sample has a very different class/cultural profile to the questionnaire
sample. Thirty-three of these students are the first generation in their family to apply
to university. However, of the remaining twenty, two had aunts or uncles – rather
than parents – who had attended university. A further two are African refugees
currently living in conditions of impoverishment apart from their families. Only
fifteen (28 per cent) of the fifty-three interviewees are from the established middle
classes, namely socio-economic groups I and II with a history of degree level
attainment. At FFEC, for example, eighteen of the mature students are from groups
III Manual, IV and V and only four from established middle-class backgrounds.
Only twenty-three of the fifty-three students in the qualitative sample are white
and only twelve of these twenty-three identify themselves as white English. In CCS,
the predominantly multi-ethnic, working-class comprehensive, five students are
Bengali, four African and one Chinese. Only one of the eleven students interviewed is
white and he identifies himself as Irish, while in the private boys school seven of the
boys interviewed are white English, five are Asian and one is Chinese. In the
following discussion, the students’ described ethnicity is the one they chose to
identify themselves by.
These students, therefore, come from a very specific segment of higher education
applicants. A majority are individuals who, even as recently as ten years ago, would
have been very unlikely to be applying to university. They are ‘survivors’ of a process
of class attrition in education. While their narratives are not typical of the entire
university entry cohort, they do focus attention on non-traditional university
entrants and in doing so raise important issues in relation to ‘race’ and class and the
higher education choice process. In contrast, the middle-class students are typical of
their peers and provide some useful comparisions.
‘Not much of a choice’: class differentiated processes within
higher education decision-making
As Giddens (1995) points out, choice is a medium of both power and
stratification. Individuals applying to do higher education courses are making very
different kinds of choices within very different circumstances and constraints.
Degrees of choice were most evident in the extent to which students talked about
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
geographical constraints. Here we can see the continuing powerful influence of
structural factors on higher education choice. The transcripts of the working-class
students were saturated with a localism that was absent from the narratives of more
economically privileged students.2 Material constraints of travel and finance often
mean they are operating within very limited spaces of choice in which, for example,
an extra few stops on the tube can place an institution beyond the boundaries of
conceivable choice.
Khalid is an extreme example of working-class localism, but most of the
working-class students felt geographically constrained:
You see City University is walking distance from my home, Westminister is also walking
distance, but it’s not that short as it is to City University. So I’m sort of still thinking.
[Khalid, working-class, Bengali student, CCS]
A number of the FE students spoke about working out the relative costs of travelling
to different London higher-education institutions and, while travel costs were not
their sole criterion of choice, they clearly played a major role in delineating the
possible from the impossible:
Yes, I live near Putney Bridge, and Roehampton, for locality Roehampton appeals,
because I can go home for tea. And I also thought about being a poor student and I
thought well, it’s about 90 pence on the bus.
[Debbie, Scottish working-class FE student]
As the example of Khalid demonstrates, localism is a ‘race’ as well as a class issue.
Forty per cent of minority students are located in the London universities and
primarily in the ‘new’ and less established university sector (Preece 1999). While this
concentration can partly be attributed to localism in that minority ethnic young
people are to be found disportionately in the capital, there are further issues around
fitting in, which we discuss later, that reinforce and compound minority students’
inclination to think local.
However, choice of higher education is also, of course, constrained by the
predicted and actual A-level grades achieved by the students. A-level achievement
(and subsequent performance at University) is effected by a range of factors. Clearly
one factor is time available for and devoted to study. Students from both white and
minority working-class families were much more likely than their more affluent
counterparts to be working long hours in the labour market and to envisage having
to continue to do so whilst studying for a degree.
Across our questionnaire sample of 502, a third of the students from the
established middle classes were in paid employment compared with two thirds of
students from ‘unskilled’ households. In all two thirds of the state school students
were working, a third of the private students and 40 per cent of the mature students.
Only one private school student was working more than 15 hours. Those working
over 10 hours a week were also concentrated at the lower end of the socio-economic
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scale. Amongst the established middle classes only 10 per cent were working more
than 10 hours, 17 per cent of the ordinary middle classes, 21 per cent of the routine
non-manual, 30 per cent of III Manual and 31 per cent of the unskilled. Not
surprisingly there was a strong inverse link between number of hours worked and
number of hours devoted to homework (Pearson’s correlation one-tail test is
significant p<0.001). In addition we can note that forty-one (15 per cent) of students
reported having extra tuition, over a quarter of private school students did so, less
than 10 per cent of state school students (and one Access student).
Such practices make the possibility of attaining grades which would make elite
universities a realistic goal easy for some and far more difficult for others. The
qualitative data shed further light on this. Shaun (CCS), who was predicted an A and
two C grades, and had been hoping to go to Sussex to study Sociology, was despairing
about his chances of success:
It’s all gone wrong for me. Because I’ve been getting no help from home I’ve had to find
the money for rent, food everything basically and there’s no way I can get the work done
anymore. I’m too exhausted.
[Shaun, Irish working-class, CCS]
and:
I started to work for Safeways, and it has had a big effect on my education, because mostly
I say I am coping, but what really happens is you are kidding yourself, when you say you
are coping, because you are not, there is so much to do.
[Khalid, Bengali working-class, CCS]
Fiona’s text highlights the impossibility of pursuing a course of acquiring
academic distinction which is increasingly common within the private sector, but
from which working-class students like herself are excluded because of the
exigencies of their economic circumstances:
And then I started at Marks and Spencers and I was doing four days a week and trying to
juggle four A levels. … And the four days in Marks and Spencers, even three A levels is
impossible with all that other work.
[Fiona, Irish working-class, MU]
Fiona eventually dropped her fourth A level. While two of the twelve boys at CB were
studying four A levels none of the other state-educated students in the sample were
studying more than three A levels. In Fiona, Khalid and Shaun’s accounts we can see
how structural influences, by constraining poorer students’ range of options, operate
to maintain hierarchies of distinction and differentiation within the field of higher
education.
Exclusionary processes also operate within the field of higher education itself
with far more working-class than middle-class students talking about undertaking
paid employment in both term time and the vacations while studying for a degree.
Only two (out of a total of thirteen) Cosmopolitan boys contemplated undertaking
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
paid work during term time when at university. A further two thought they might
have to work in the holidays. Only three were working at the time. In contrast,
fourteen of the twenty-three FE students were working at the time and all apart from
two said they would need to work while doing their degree. At CCS, nine out of
eleven young people were working at the time and all anticipated working when at
university. At Maitland Union, five out of eight had part-time employment, although
all eight had worked throughout the lower sixth, and six expected to undertake paid
work at degree level. Rick, a white working-class FE student, while perhaps stating an
extreme case, sums up a collective conundrum for working-class students currently
contemplating higher education:
Not much of a choice really. It’s either poverty or failure, ’cos I think having to work three
days a week won’t leave enough time to do the right amount of studying, and anyway if
I’m in it for the experience of learning new things I need time to be able to do that … to get
some enjoyment out of it, so I guess it’s poverty.
[Rick, FFEC]
The importance of paid employment for the less affluent students, its centrality
in their lives, meant it sometimes had an impact on choice that rarely emerged in the
transcripts of young people from secure middle-class families.
‘I’d never fit in there’: psychological constraints on choice
In a world where individuals are increasingly held accountable for their own
fate (Beck 1995; Giddens 1991), it is unfashionable to stress the continuing
importance of deeply rooted material and emotional constraints on choice. While
the shape of these constraints shifts considerably according to ethnicity, class and
sex, all the students were subject to them. Yet, while material constraints were readily
articulated by respondents, there were often only hints and barely articulated
suggestions of emotional constraints on choice. However, as Giddens argues, that
does not mean that psychological constraints are not pervasive (1995: 75):
Choices are blocked, or programmed, by unconscious emotions, which cannot first be
thought away by listing indefinite numbers of ‘options’. Depending upon how fixed
unconscious traits are presumed to be, one’s genogram could be seen as setting clear
limits to feasible options. To see day-to-day life as an amalgam of free choices is to fly in
the face of psychological reality.
However, as indicated above, while all the students in widely differing ways were
circumscribed in their choices this circumscription was highly class differentiated.
Some of the working-class students appeared to be subject to emotional as well as
material constraints on their choices. For them choice-making seemed to be, in part,
a process of psychological self-exclusion in which traditional universities are often
discounted. Middle-class white Sophia is convinced her working-class colleagues at
FE college are governed by powerful emotional constraints:
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There is bigotry and bias, there is definitely no doubt about it, but people are very
passionate about that in places like this, being a woman, being a single mother, being
black, being gay. It is something that is a major issue for these people and they think that
these things are going to be held against them when they go to interview and they feel
places like UCL, King’s and LSE won’t want students like them, but it just isn’t true
anymore.
However, Sophia, with ‘lecturers in my family’ is positioned very differently
within the field of higher education to most of the other mature students. The risks
for working-class students are evident in Dave’s words. Recalling a conversation he
has had with a mature student from the previous year who went on to study at King’s,
he comments ‘she said she felt quite sort of – out of her class. That she didn’t fit in’.
Pragmatic rationality for middle-class students does stretch as far as applying for
LSE or King’s, whereas for most working-class students like Dave, and Mick and Sally
quoted below, it clearly does not.
‘What’s a person like me going to do at a place like that?’
Knowing one’s academic place
Bourdieu writes of how objective limits become transformed into a practical
anticipation of objective limits; a sense of one’s place which leads one to exclude
oneself from places from which one is excluded (Bourdieu 1984:471). Mick (FFEC),
who describes himself as white working-class, has rejected the more elite universities
like King’s because, as he asserts, ‘What’s a person like me going to do at a place like
that’ and says that he would find ‘going somewhere like King’s daunting’. Despite
what the league tables say, for Mick, Roehampton is a good university because, after a
negative experience of schooling, his priority is to go to an institution where he is
comfortable, somewhere where there is a chance he will feel at home within
education. Many of the working-class students, particularly those on the Access
courses, echo similar sentiments:
SALLY :
I wasn’t bothered about the league tables because I already knew where I wanted
to go and I knew it was a good place.
DIANE:
Good in the sense of ...?
S A L LY :
Well, that it’s the right place for me.
Here Sally exhibits a very Bourdieurian sense of place: of ‘one’s relationship to the
world and one’s proper place within it’ (Bourdieu 1984:474). For students like Sally –
and, to an extent, Mick – university league tables are often an irrelevance. As
Bourdieu and Passeron point out, in relation to access to higher education, choices
are governed by what it is ‘reasonable to expect’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:226),
and both Sally and Mick have developed expectations that are acceptable ‘for people
like us’ (Bourdieu 1990:64–5).
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
The transcripts highlight the importance of students’ psychological, as well as
their financial and academic, proximity to different universities. For some students, a
particular university is very definitely where they want to be:
Once I had been there I just knew. I will be really upset if I don’t get the grades which I
need because now I can’t really imagine going anywhere else.
[Anthony, white middle-class, CB]
I just liked the feel, you know, when you just walk in somewhere and think, I could be
happy here.
[Carly, white working-class FE student]
The importance of choosing somewhere where one feels safe and/or happy raises
the issue of risk in relation to university choice. Most of the students are applying to
low risk universities where if they are from an ethnic minority there is an ethnic mix,
if they are privileged they will find intellectual and social peers, and if they are
mature students there is a high percentage of mature students (over half of these
were choosing SOAS or Roehampton and all these thirteen mentioned the
percentage of mature students as a positive factor in their choice).
‘Fitting in’ is a multi-faceted process in which there are those who want to fit in
and others who have to be fitted in with. The overwhelming whiteness of the
university system is part of the reason why minority students across class divisions,
even when they say social composition is not important, still demonstrate a keen
awareness of issues around cultural mix. Bird et al. (1992) also found more awareness
around issues of cultural diversity, and more reflexivity on the part of minority
students than among the majority of white students. In our sample the same level of
awareness is largely absent among the white middle classes who tend to say cultural
mix is something they have ‘never considered’ or ‘doesn’t bother them’. The rare
occasions cultural diversity is considered to be an issue, more elitist attitudes emerge:
I may be a bit snobbish in the sense that I wouldn’t like to be spending … I don’t think I
could actually get on with people if they got very bad grades and then got into a bad
university, due to the simple class of persons there … bottom of the intellect and who
deserved to be there academically. I like more intelligent conversation.
[Simon, white, middle-class, CB]
‘The good university’
Conceptions of ‘the good university’ are both racialised and classed. In
particular, some of the working-class students whose levels of academic achievement
and material circumstances provide wider choices appear to be wrestling with
difficult conflictual feelings about what constitutes a good university for them.
Although in the main they conform to mainstream evaluations as evidenced in
official league tables, they also often allude to the problems inherent in going places
‘where there are few people like me’. Candice, a black, working-class student at MU,
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hints at both a collective fate she is trying to escape and concerns around her
difference when she discusses her desire to go to ‘a good university’:
It’s been really scary thinking that you could have made the wrong decision, very anxiety
inducing … I think it’s more difficult if no one in your family’s been there. I think in a
funny sort of way its more difficult if you’re black too … Because you want to go to a good
university but you don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb. It’s a bit sad isn’t it. I’ve sort of
avoided all the universities with lots of black students because they’re all the universities
which aren’t seen as so good. If you’re black and not very middle-class and want to do well
then you end up choosing places where people like you don’t go and I think that’s difficult.
Embedded in Candice’s text, as well as those of other high achieving workingclass students, are complicated issues around the crossing of psychological barriers
which involves a recognition of ‘difficulties’ but still allows them to aim for a
university place that outstrips the collective expectations of ‘people like us’. At the
same time Candice’s dilemma illustrates the ways in which class and ‘race’ are
interwoven in the higher education choice process, and how their effects can amplify
and deepen anxiety, as well as, for some, offset one another. Candice displays ‘the
anxiety about the future characteristic of students who have come from the social
strata that are furthest away from academic culture and who are condemned to
experience that culture as unreal’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979:53). And while
Bourdieu and Passeron’s focus is class distance, Candice’s words also suggest an
ethnic distance, at least in relation to more prestigious universities. Existing
literature, whilst addressing social class inequalities in access (Ainley 1994; Brown
and Scase 1994) focuses far less on the influences of ethnicity. Yet, the narratives of
these non-traditional students implicate ethnicity as a powerful mediating factor
which often operates to compound the discriminatory workings of class.
As white, working-class Pete’s narrative below illustrates, despite residual
ambivalences, the compunctions about moving beyond ‘one’s proper place’ can be
resolved. He is one of only four working-class Access students out of a total of
nineteen who are applying to predominantly old rather than new universities. His
list of six universities includes five established London University colleges, including
King’s and LSE. His rationale initially is confusing. On the one hand, although he has
not applied to them ‘because I think I am worthy of going to one of those places’, he
does value challenge and feels that ‘if they are prepared to offer you a place you must
be good enough to go there’ and ‘would feel quite honoured to be offered a place’. On
the other hand, while their reputation is an attraction, he feels ‘all the stuff that goes
with it is a bit off-putting’. He recognises their ‘race’ and class bias as a problem, sees
them as ‘bastions of tradition’, and asserts that he is ‘not falling over himself to get to
know a whole lot of privately educated kids’. But he is clear, unlike Mick, that he
would not be ‘daunted’ and actually feels ‘it might well benefit those posh kids to have
to deal with someone like me’. Although in a situation of similar contingent
economic and geographical circumstances to those of the other working-class
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
students on his Access course he, unlike most of them, has literally thought himself
into another, extremely unfamiliar, space and envisages it as one in which he can
survive.
Julia and Lesley, both white and working-class, are two of the remaining three
working-class Access students applying to traditional universities. They provide us
with a slightly different perspective on finding ‘the right academic place’. In their
rationalisations the good university is conflated with places where there are ‘few
people like me’. In a similar process to Candice, they have avoided universities with
students like themselves. Julia argues that ‘the kind of place that would have accepted
me for a degree isn’t the kind of place that I would have wanted to go to’, while Lesley
ironically sums up the problematic for students like herself:
I would rather not do a degree than do my degree at the University of North London …
It’s a bit like, you know, that Groucho remark, I don’t want to be a member of any club that
will have me.
While, unlike Pete, they do not engage directly with issues of class, their narratives
problematise what Pete presents as a fairly straightforward process. Their rationale
resonates with Beverley Skegg’s women students’ dis-identifications from their
current class positioning (Skeggs 1997). Students like Julia and Lesley whilst
recognising ‘their place’, imbue this with connotations of deficit and were attempting
to leave. For them the spaces which have opened up within higher education for
minority and white working-class students were, by definition, degraded places they
sought to avoid, aspiring instead to the places of more privileged others. Both were
caught up in processes of dis-identification from their current social positioning. As
Julia said, ‘I didn’t want to go somewhere that would accept me as I was, because I’d
had GCSEs and two failed attempts at A levels’.
In both Julia and Lesley’s comments we can see how symbolic violence can be
enacted at one’s own expense (Bourdieu 1990). There are powerful resonances with
the attitudes of the working-class men in Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) ‘Hidden Injuries
of Class’ and at the same time a key difference. While the stigma associated with
being working-class kept Sennett and Cobb’s manual workers where they were, it is
propelling Lesley and Julia out of working-class places and into much more
unfamiliar middle-class terrain. There is a complex psychological paradox here,
because such acts of symbolic violence, the engagement in processes of disidentification, are pivotal to Julia and Lesley thinking themselves into other, more
privileged, spaces. As Bourdieu asserts, the insoluble contradiction inscribed into the
very logic of symbolic domination means that when the dominated work at
destroying that which marks them out as vulgar such ‘submission may be liberating.
Such is the paradox of the dominated, and there is no way out of it’ (Bourdieu
1990:155).
However, similar sentiments to those expressed by Julia and Lesley about the
unacceptability of some of the new universities are echoed by the middle-class
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students. For example, Keeval, a middle-class Asian student at Cosmopolitan Boys,
comments:
Basically yeah, I didn’t look at some universities at all, because I didn’t think they were a
good basis for going to a job. University of Middlesex, was like, laughable.
Yet, the feeling that universities like Middlesex are not good enough signifies very
differently for working-class Candice and Julia than it does for middle-class Keeval.
The middle-class students are not implicating themselves when they talk about
avoiding new universities, although as Candice suggests, such avoidance is racialised
as well as classed. Entwined within desires for self-advancement for working-class
students are difficult impulses which raise the spectre of both denial and pathology;
a pathology that implicates both self and others like oneself. Such desires are far from
straightforward and are often complicated by their potential for the sort of psychic
damage that Skeggs describes in relation to her working-class, female students.
Evidence of dis-identification for white and minority working-class students
seems to be related to the growing stratification within higher education provision
and the classification of universities according to the cultural characteristics of their
intakes; what (Bourdieu, 1986:473) calls ‘practical attributive judgements’. While
there was a sizeable minority of working-class students who had a list of six
preferences which were all or nearly all traditional universities, there were virtually
no middle-class students who were applying to predominantly new universities. A
number of middle-class boys at CB routinely end up at new universities, but it is
almost always because they have failed to obtain the grades necessary to take up
places at more prestigious universities.
Processes of stratification
As what were once elite university systems become majority systems of tertiary
education, the national responses have varied, but in no cases do ruling groups simply
devote greater resources to expanded systems that strive to educate a broader range of
citizens.
[Collins 1999b:234]
Higher education in the UK is clearly stratified and differentiated in a
number of ways. Despite the abolition of the ‘binary divide’ the existing material
advantages of a small cluster of elite institutions have been preserved (Fisher et al.
1996; Shattock 1998). Alongside and related to such material differences is the
elaboration of a cultural and social hierarchy, which is grafted on to ‘historic’
discriminations. Some universities are subject to ‘attributive judgements’ based
upon the size of their working-class and ethnic intakes.
South Bank university has a reputation somehow of being an ethnic university and I think
that’s not good for getting jobs afterwards.
[Annas, African middle-class, FFEC]
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
Everyone says North London is a working-class university so I don’t think it’s a very good
place to go to.
[Janice, black working-class, FFEC]
As Modood and Acland point out ‘despite all the difficulties associated with
migration, cultural and linguistic adaptation, racism and a disadvantaged parental
occupational profile, most minority groups are producing greater proportions of
applications and admissions to higher education than the white population’
(1998:161). However, Rubina’s words encapsulate a common rationale for applying to
university among minority working-class students in the sample which may go some
way to explain the motivations underlying the statistics:
Very soon I think having a degree is going to be a minimum requirement, very soon if you
want … even just a reasonable job, if you don’t have a degree forget it. And for us, first of
all we are women, so we are going to be discriminated against, colour of your skin you are
going to be discriminated against, so you have to be better than the best if you’re trying to
get a job.
[Rubina, Bengali, working-class student, CCS]
Also, despite the positive advances Modood and Acland document, minority
students, in particular, are frequently caught up in an inescapable dilemma. Earlier
research has indicated that some minority students are hesitant about entering
institutions with small numbers of students or staff from their own ethnic
background and desire to go to institutions with an ethnic mix (Allen 1998; Acland
and Azmi 1998). As noted already, the higher education choice process for the
minority students in our sample often involves treading a fine line between the desire
to ‘fit in’ and being stereotyped or discriminated against in majority ethnic settings.
In such a scenario, choice becomes extremely difficult, painful even. Having lots of
students of your own ethnicity is reassuring, and Islamic and Afro-Caribbean
societies provide a sense of home. Yet, there remain uncomfortable issues around
deficit. Shuma’s expression of surprise that when she went to UCL for an interview,
there were ‘all Asians there. I didn’t expect it because its one of the best universities’
seems to suggest that she has internalised a connection between ‘best’ and ‘whiteness’,
at least within the sphere of higher education. However, that was not how most black
and ethnic minority students approached the relationship between ‘race’ and higher
education. A number of the minority students talk about specific universities that
have racist reputations: ‘Yeah, he goes that it’s very white there and a bit racist, not
really a good one, don’t go there’ (Temi, black, middle-class, CCS). Because
historically whiteness has rarely been problematised within social theory,
universities have seldom been conceptualised as racialised environments. Their
overriding whiteness is read as normative. Yet, as Temi’s words indicate, for many of
the minority students in the sample what constitutes a ‘good’ university cannot be
separated out from issues of ‘race’.
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However,‘race’ is enmeshed in wider issues of culture which include class. Fitting
in and feeling comfortable appear to be dependent on a complex amalgam of factors.
These, while incorporating ethnicity, are much broader, as Ong (Chinese, workingclass, MU) demonstrates when he tries to explain why he turned down an offer from
Cambridge, a place he says all his friends thought he was mad to refuse:
It was a complete shock, it was different from anywhere else I have ever been, it was too
traditional, too old fashioned, from another time altogether. I didn’t like it at all. It was
like going through a medieval castle when you were going down the corridors. The dining
room was giant long tables, pictures, it was like a proper castle, and I was thinking –
where’s the moat, where’s the armour? Save me from this.You know, you expect little
pictures with eyes moving around, watching you all the time. And I just didn’t like the
atmosphere, not one bit.
You get a sense in Ong’s words that Cambridge is worlds away from his experience
not only spatially but temporally as well. Also, although the subtext to his narrative is
the alienation of class cultural differences, such differences are often imbued with
‘race’, as Sarah’s narrative illustrates. She suggests an intractability of racial difference
when she tries to explain why her brother’s best friend turned down an offer of a
place at Cambridge despite getting three A levels:
I’ve heard a lot about Oxford and Cambridge about how the people there are so
pompous, and you know, one of my brother’s friends, Simon, he got three As, had the
interview at Cambridge, he got accepted and he rejected them, because he didn’t
like the way they behaved. He said they were very traditional and very pompous, stuck
up … So, I mean, there are a lot of people who have been to Cambridge and told me
what it’s like and they’ve all said it’s a very hard place to be if you’re black, even if
you’re rich.
[Sarah, black, middle-class, CCS]
Despite the strong sense of agency in both these accounts, only Simon really has a
choice because he achieves the grades Cambridge asks for and Ong does not. Whilst
highlighting the perceived alienness of elite universities for minority and especially
minority working-class students, these two quotes underscore the heterogeneity of
minority students. They have widely differing amounts of social power and
dominant cultural capital and, concomitantly, differing degrees of choice in relation
to the field of higher education. Partly, these differences can be attributed to class
positioning, as we have seen throughout this paper, but they are also a result of the
extent to which different minority groups have established themselves in Britain and
this has consequences for recent refugees in particular. Annas encapsulates the
common dilemma for refugees of having cultural capital in a different currency,
when he says ‘it is difficult for an outsider’. Born into an academic family in Jordan,
for the past four years he has been struggling to make his own way in a strange
country where he is finding it extremely difficult to decipher the British higher
education field:
Choices of Degree or Degrees of Choice?
I did not get a source where it was very clear which university is the best one, but when you
put all your questions to different people you get an idea that some are better than others,
even though the universities all tell you they are really good. When you do your research
you can’t get a clear idea out of all these things but you get … impressions, or you feel you
are doing the right thing, maybe, I don’t know.You can’t be sure.
Annas, despite his middle-class status, is struggling to convert his assets of cultural
capital into a currency which enables him to decode an unfamiliar field. Social class,
migration patterns and diverse cultural traditions all have a bearing on the decisionmaking of minority students generating a complex diffusion of choices which,
although we do not have the space to explore fully here, we take up and develop in a
further paper (Ball et al. 2002 forthcoming).
Conclusion
The history of higher education in Britain is one overshadowed by class
inequalities (Halsey 1993; Blackburn and Jarman 1993; Egerton and Halsey 1993),
and it appears that the recent transition from elite to mass system of higher
education has done little so far to erode class differentials in access. However, the
concern necessarily has always been focused on those working-class students who
were excluded from higher education. In contrast, in relation to ‘race’, minority
students’ greater take up of university places proportionate to their white
counterparts has been celebrated as a success story (Modood and Acland 1998). In
this paper we have focused on ‘the success stories’ – not only working-class and
middle-class minority students but also white working-class applicants to
university, who perhaps, considering the history of access to higher education in
Britain, constitute even more of a success story. However, we argue that our findings
reveal causes for concern as well as reasons for celebration. The field of higher
education is still far from a level playing field. Our research indicates that despite
increasing numbers of working-class students, in particular those from minority
ethnic backgrounds, applying to university, for the most part, their experiences of
the choice process are qualitatively different to that of their more privileged middleclass counterparts (Reay 1998; Reay 2001).
In this preliminary analysis of some of our questionnaire and interview data the
most powerful and pervasive issue to emerge is that of class and racial inequalities. To
put it another way the choice-making of the middle-class and working-class students
are very different and the higher educations they confront and anticipate are
different and separate. Class tendencies are compounded by ‘race’. Just as most
working-class students end up in less prestigious institutions so do most young
people from minority ethnic groups ( Modood and Acland 1998). The combination
and interplay of individual, familial and institutional factors produces very different
‘opportunity structures’ (Roberts 1993).
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diane reay, jacqueline davies, miriam david and stephen j. ball
Behind the very simple idea of a mass system of higher education we have to
recognise a very complex institutional hierarchy and the continued reproduction of
racialised and classed inequalities. Higher education is not the same experience for
all, neither is it likely to offer the same rewards for all. As Helen Lucey, Valerie and
June Melody assert: ‘There is a creeping assumption … that if we open up higher
education to working class students then we can all become professionals. This is the
biggest fiction of all’ (Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody 2001).
acknowledgement
We would like to thank the three anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper.
notes
1. While there are now slightly more women than men in higher education, gender
inequalities are still very evident within particular subject areas mirroring the inequalities
in A levels (Arnot, David and Weiner 1999). This continuing disparity and other aspects of
gender will be the subject of a separate paper.
2. As this is a London-based study, for those students who have to stay at home, the options
are greater in the capital than elsewhere. For example, the travel considerations may be
very different in other parts of the country in so far as London students can more easily
satisfy their needs given the variety of institutions.
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Biographical notes: DIANE REAY is a senior lecturer in research methods in the School of Social
Science and Public Policy, King’s College London. She has published widely in the areas of
gender, social class and ethnicity. Recent publications include Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement
in their Children’s Schooling, University College Press (1998). MIRIAM E. DAVID is a Professor
of Policy Studies in the Department of Education at Keele University. Recent publications
include (edited with D. Woodward, Falmer, 1998), Negotiating the Glass Ceiling: Senior Women
in the Academic World, and (with M. Arnot and G. Weiner, Polity, 1999), Closing the Gender Gap:
Post War Education and Social Change. STEPHEN J. BALL is Karl Mannheim Professor of
Sociology of Education at the University of London Institute of Education. He is an
Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences and editor of the Journal of Education Policy. He
is author of several books on education policy, including Education Reform (1994), Markets,
Choice and Equity(1995, with Sharon Gewirtz and Richard Bowe), and Choice, Pathways and
Transitions Post 16 (2000, with Mag Maguire and Sheila Macrae). He is also editor of the four
volume Sociology of Education: Major Themes. His work has focused, in particular, on education
markets and the theorisation of policy. JACQUELINE DAVIES is a researcher at City University.
She has published on social policy issues of choice in education and public sector regulation.
Currently working in health policy, she has undertaken research into choice in maternity care
and professional development of nurses.
Address: Dr. Diane Reay, School of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London,
Cornwall House, Waterloo Road, London, SE1 8WA.