Higher education should be a social good for everyone and, despite the intentions of university policy on inclusion and diversity with schemes on widening participation, the truth is that for working-class students, university is still a place where they encounter prejudices and feelings of exclusion. This article uses the method of…

There has been strong advocacy for educators to extensively examine pedagogical assumptions to design more inclusive and accessible classes. However, our assumptions about inclusivity and the interplay of privilege and students' "common sense" have received little attention. As such, a common sense gap exists, where faculty may regard…

This article reviewed how cultural capital theory is applied in China, focusing on the definition of cultural capital, the aspects of cultural capital most relevant to academic achievement, and the association between cultural capital and academic achievement. The review encompassed empirical studies published between 2001 and 2024, sourced from…

With a General Election just weeks away -- what are the British public's views on equality of opportunity and social mobility? Do today's voters want to see greater action to level the playing field, and should we be investing to equalise opportunities? To answer those questions, the Sutton Trust has commissioned More in Common to conduct…

This paper examines how pupils' aspirations towards higher education (HE) are shaped and reinforced in Chile. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework and building on relevant scholarship focussed on HE decision-making and choices, it introduces two dual-headed conceptual tools which allow a grasp of relevant differences between social…

In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a 'low intensity civil war' against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of…

This paper analyzes the development of social inequality in the Polish higher education system during its expansion after 1990 using data from the Polish General Social Survey. Focusing on the special case of a former socialist society, where higher education expansion has been very rapid and achieved mainly through marketization, this paper…

This paper explores how, in what ways, and with what outcomes, deep structural transformations have reconstituted higher education in England, and are deeply implicated in the rise of authoritarian populism. We focus particularly on the ways in which our understandings and lived experiences of class, social mobility, meritocracy, social…

One of the specificities of French higher education is that there is no single higher education system but two compartmentalised and hierarchical higher education systems comprising (1) universities and (2) "grande école" higher education institutions. Competing for a place in the latter requires that students have succeeded in…

Quality education is a human right and all individuals and peoples regardless of their social, ethnic, personal, economic, gender, or religion, should be able to participate and engage in productive and lifelong learning. This volume explores the ways in which intercultural and inclusive education have been addressed in Latin America through…

An illuminating look at the emotional costs of mobility faced by first-generation and low-income college students. While college initiates a major transition in all students' lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to…

Based on the educational hierarchical reproduction theory and the MMI and EMI hypotheses, this paper discusses the impact of the tracking of general and vocational education at the secondary level on higher education opportunity equity among social classes. The study finds that increasing gross enrollment rates of both general high schools and…

Since the restoration of the "Gaokao" (College Entrance Examination) in 1977 and the nationwide higher education expansion that started in 1998, millions of rural students have enrolled in urban universities. Though Chinese rural students' educational trajectories have received extensive attention, their subjective experiences in the…

In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person's classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these…

The purpose of this article is to examine academia and the abuse of power based on auto-ethnographic research. I draw on my experiences across 12 universities in different locations in Spain, the UK and the USA that expose the way power is embedded in institutions of higher education and how it is maintained. This article analyses the exploration…