ABSTRACT
The earlier chapters of this book have traced growth of higher education in the UK and identified the political changes in welfare benefits and the implications for youth employment and patterns of participation in post compulsory education. These changes have all occurred within a political discourse of widening access and increasing participation in higher education. However within the rhetoric of this expansionist agenda there has been a persistent trend to recruit from the middle classes. The emphasis on free market principles, linked with a continued manipulation of the funding mechanisms and the introduction of loans and fees has been such that certain groups and sections of the community have been effectively discriminated against. This monograph considers some of the factors that influence and facilitate young people in their university choices The data have enabled me to theorize on three key concepts, of which two have firm historical roots and one is new. First is the durability of class based educational inequalities that are revealed by making comparisons with the Jackson and Marsden (1962) study. Second is the emergence of kinship, identity and anxiety comparable with the study in the Swansea Valley in the 1960s (Barker, 1972; Leonard, 1980). The modern theme is concerned with the emergence of gender specific roles within the family and the prominence of the father in the university choice process. The narrative accounts of parents, students and teachers are presented within broad theoretical perspectives since theory 'allows us to de-familiarize present practices and categories of experience' (Ball, 1995:266). The work of Bourdieu has clearly underpinned the analysis and has been used to consider the implications of class in terms of social and cultural reproduction in education. In addition I have drawn on the theorising of Basil Bernstein in order to explore the ways in which decision making is negotiated within families and used the traditions of social anthropology to allow me to demonstrate the affective significance of family and localism. In this final chapter I will revisit these themes in order to develop some typologies of both the schools and families in the study. I will offer some additional theorising on the data in order to underscore the complexities of social class and higher education choices in order to comment on the very real class based university challenge.
