Higher Education and Social Inequalities

Dr Richard Waller has taught sociology in higher education since 1995, and is currently Associate Professor of the Sociology of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has published widely on higher education and social class, and is currently co-writing a sociology of education textbook for Routledge and co-editing an international handbook of lifelong education for Palgrave (both due for publication in 2017). At present he is working on the second three-year phase of the Leverhulme Trust funded Paired Peers project which followed a cohort of undergraduate students studying at Bristol’s two universities. Richard was co-convenor of the BSA’s Education Study Group (2009-2013) and is on the editorial board of four journals including the British Journal of Sociology of Education.Dr Nicola Ingram is a lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department for Educational Research at Lancaster University and co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Bourdieu and Education study groups. Her research is broadly focused on social inequalities in education and she is particularly interested in issues of identity, class, gender and ethnicity in young people’s transitions. She has published widely on these areas. Since 2010 Nicola has been working on the Paired Peers project (with, amongst others, Richard Waller), and this was the source of the co-authored 2016 Palgrave book Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility: The Degree generation.Dr Michael R.M. Ward is a lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at Swansea University. His work centres on the performance of working-class masculinities within and beyond educational institutions and he is the author of the award winning 2015 book From Labouring to Learning, Working-class Masculinities, Education and De-industrialization (Palgrave MacMillan). He is also the editor of Gender Identity and Research Relationships in the Studies in Qualitative Methods book series (Emerald). Mike is co-convenor of the BSA Education Study Group and editorial board member for Sociological Research Online and the Journal of Boyhood Studies.

This is a hugely important addition to the literature on higher education and social mobility. Through a series of thought-provoking chapters the prevailing assumption that a university experience is both equally experienced and automatically confers advantage on its recipients is meticulously unpicked, interrogated, and dismantled. This must-read book makes a significant contribution to debates on widening participation and social justice at a time of heightened marketisation and stratification of global HE. – Jacqueline Stevenson, Head of Research, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, UKThis is an important book that brings together many key scholars on the sociology of higher education. It explores, in a detailed manner, the ways in which social factors (and particularly class) continue to shape access to higher education, and students’ experiences both during their degree and as they move into the labour market. – Rachel Brooks, Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey, UKThis book provides a most important contribution to the field of equity by interrogating assumptions about the relationship between university access and social mobility. It casts a much-needed light on significant questions of transitional processes through and beyond higher education and the ways that inequities play out in relation to graduate outcomes. – Penny Jane Burke, Professor and Global Innovation Chair of Equity Director, University of Newcastle, Australia Waller, Ingram, and Ward have produced a timely and critical text challenging the assumption that widening participation is achieved at the point of admission. Through a thoughtful presentation of the higher education journey, we are presented with an empirically rich and theoretically-driven account of the complex and durable relationship between social class and higher education. This book is essential reading for those concerned with social justice and higher education; it has added a prominent voice to the on-going widening participation debate. – Ciaran Burke, Lecturer in Sociology, Plymouth University, UK

• Introduction: setting the scene Part I: Getting in: higher education access and participation 1. Admissions, adaptations, and anxieties: social class inside and outside the elite university 2. Struggling for selfhood: Non-traditional mature students’ critical perspectives on access to higher education courses in England 3. How meritocratic is admission to highly selective UK universities? 4. Patterns of participation in a period of change: social trends in English higher education from 2000 to 2016 Part II: Getting on: classed experiences of higher education 5. A tale of two universities: class work in the field of higher education 6. How to win at being a student 7. Social class, ethnicity and the process of 'Fitting in' 8. The 'Jack Wills Brigade': brands, embodiment, and class identities in higher education Part III: Getting out: social class and graduate destinations 9. Higher education and the myths of graduate employability 10. A glass half full? Social class and access to postgraduate study 11. Participation in paid and unpaid internships among creative and communications graduates: does class advantage play a part? 12. Gendered and classed graduate transitions to work: how the unequal playing field is constructed, maintained, and experienced Conclusion: social class, participation, and the marketised university