This article is based on a comparative study of working-class students' experiences in English and Irish higher education. It highlights the lack of comparative studies on this topic based on qualitative research and why filling this gap is important in understanding access and widening participation. Drawing on biographical interviews with 139…

The interaction between doctoral education and social class is under-researched, yet is perceived to play an important part in securing social mobility. Research that does exist tends to focus on issues of access or transition, rather than considering experiences during the doctorate. This article focuses on doctoral students' experiences of…

The paper places youth transitions and vocational education and training (VET) within the global policy context in which economic competiveness is hegemonic. It compares research from the 1970s/80s, which explored young peoples' lived experiences of VET and youth training schemes with contemporary work on similar themes. It argues that there are…

There has been a rapid global expansion of English instruction in the early grades in public school curricula. Particularly in so-called developing countries, the increase of and its shift from exclusively private to public education is linked to the idea that acquiring English promotes personal, social, and economic development. The author takes…

First-generation college students (students for whom neither parent has a 4-year college degree) earn lower grades and worry more about whether they belong in college, compared with continuing-generation students (who have at least 1 parent with a 4-year college degree). We conducted a longitudinal follow-up of participants from a study in which a…

Many Chicagoans are getting shortchanged, particularly when it comes to money exchange between the Illinois Lottery (IL) and Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). A significant portion of lottery sales is earmarked for education in Illinois. Because these revenues are not generated equally, however, some contribute more to education via the…

Elite boarding schools endeavor to instill in their students elite-class solidarity, strong beliefs in both meritocracy and the essential rightness of the status quo, and practical political know-how. Each of these objectives is wholly compatible with the self-interest of their students and their families. In the vast majority of working-class…

Young people's perceptions may offer an insight into the complex associations between language, education and social class. However, little research has asked young people what they think of their own talking. Forty-two British adolescents aged between 14 and 15 years were interviewed: 21 attended a school in a working class area; 21 attended…

Several societies throughout the global North and South are now witnessing unprecedented patterns of marginally higher female academic performance and educational attainment. But the processes that have generated such patterns and responses to their development have not been uniform across or within these societies. In multiracial Fiji, statistics…

While researchers have begun to examine the experiences of working class students in undergraduate education more closely, we know less about the experiences of working class students in graduate school. Through a nationwide survey of graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs in Sociology, we examined the extent to which working class students…

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children's…

Stratification is a central issue in family research, yet relatively few studies highlight its impact on family processes. Drawing on in-depth interviews (N = 137) and observational data (N = 12), we extend Melvin Kohn's research on childrearing values by examining how parental commitments to self-direction and conformity are enacted in daily…

This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children's education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of…

This article reports on case study research of seven- and eight-year-old children's discourse about reading. The case studies were selected to provide classrooms in contrasting neighbourhoods within a white "working class" town in the North of England. Mixed methods were employed, but primarily the case studies were ethnographic in…

A study investigated the relationship between sex and social class in the spontaneous speech of 16 individuals from Newcastle upon Tyne (England). Specifically, the study examined the frequency of glottalized variants of three voiceless stops, and treated variation by sex as separate from, not a byproduct of, variation by class. Subjects were four…