This article explores the contrasting predispositions of a group of working-class and middle-class undergraduates to using nepotism to gain advantage in the labour market. Drawing upon a Bourdieusian framework, it is argued that the middle-class students, whose habitus was aligned to the field, were more likely to express a willingness to utilise…

First-generation, working-class college students are on the path to upward mobility and may have social and psychological problems related to cultural differences between the working class and the middle class. In her study, Hurst (2007, 2010) reports that students of working-class origin often choose loyalty to one class. However, I revise…

In the expanded higher education in China, middle-class students are found to have better access to job information than their underprivileged counterparts; they also gain better jobs in the labour market. Researchers have turned to social capital theory to explain this phenomenon, claiming that middle-class students with wider social network and…

This article explores parents' use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australia's largest city. Using Bernstein's theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated…

Finland has been celebrated as a country where everyone has the possibility to educate themselves and to get ahead in life through education. However, social differences of educability continue to persist and social differences of employability are further construed in the neo-liberal market economy. In this article we will examine 2 adult…

This paper explores the educational and migrational pathways which a number of middle-class women from Bangladesh took as they grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. It draws on qualitative research, conducted between July and November 2011, with highly educated Bangladeshi women who migrated to Britain in the early 2000s. French Sociologist Pierre…

This article aims to compare and contrast the perceptions of parental influence of indigenous middle-class students and immigrant students in Cyprus, and to investigate how their family's capital mediates students' educational choices for studies in higher education. This study draws on interview data with two students and their parents and…

While a class gap remains in obtaining a degree despite an expansion of higher education, a variety of second chances have become available. How class matters in receiving parental assistance for seeking a second chance is of increasing importance to understanding educational inequality in an altered context of higher education, but it is…

Bangladesh's post-secondary education has become a hunting ground for local economic conglomerates and their transnational allies. Applying a holistic lens helps to understand the factors and short-term effects of blindly applying neo-liberal induced deregulation and privatization that constructed a mushrooming "McDonaldization" culture…

This dissertation focuses on the growing role of private, for-profit Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) in the college application process. Over the past two decades, an "admission industrial complex" of commercial enterprises designed to help students strategize about admissions and give them information about colleges has…

Despite increasing rates of university attendance among women, a significant gender gap remains in socialisation and educational processes in Japan. To understand why and how gender-distinctive socialisation processes persist, this study aimed to examine both middle-class and working-class mothers' beliefs about gender, education, and children's…

Most new students experience school to university transition as challenging. Students from backgrounds with little or no experience of higher education are most vulnerable in this transition, and most at risk of academic failure. Emotion appears implicated in the differential way in which first-generation students and students with family…

This article discusses the academic writing challenges of undergraduate students at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), South Africa. It examines challenges such as lack of a mastery of academic writing conventions, analysis of writing topics, using writing to construct social identities; ability to research and apply knowledge across…

A diverse group of student teachers in an alternative certification program participated in seminars integrating Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed" (TO) activities. Participants created images and enacted scenes that recreated interactions with their students and also rehearsed ideas for taking action in the classroom. The research,…

This qualitative, phenomenological study was conducted to explore the lived experiences of 12 Afghan women enrolled in higher education institutions in Afghanistan. The objective was to develop an understanding of the participants' perceptions of the factors that led to their enrollment in higher education and the factors that inhibit Afghan women…