ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a minority ethnic family's motivation for upward social mobility by encouraging their children to progress to higher education and to high status careers. The disproportionate locations in the post-1992 universities can be largely explained by pre-entry educational scores and by the fact that minority ethnic students in relevant groups are more likely to come from low (socioeconomic status) SES backgrounds, attend local universities, live at home, and study subjects with a vocational orientation. Most South Asians and African-Caribbean's migrated to the UK to fill the gap caused by labour shortage in post-war years. Differences in higher education participation between majority ethnic and minority ethnic individuals from low SES backgrounds are explained by Griga and Hadjar terms of two macro-level features of educational institutions in Europe: stratification at secondary school and alternative access to higher education. Young people are not of course passive in the utilisation of ethnic capital, which interacts with other social factors such as gender.
