In this article the authors explore the notion of 'common good' in relation to adult education. They do this by drawing upon the experiences of working-class family members who were both social learners and autodidacts, and who engaged in learning for their own sake and for what they believed to be the common good. The authors use diaries, letters…

The purpose of this study is to explore how students' prior knowledge, skills, experiences, and networks (including family and community) influence major choice decisions among low-income and working-class students at Arizona's three state universities. Using a funds of knowledge framework, a survey was distributed to students at the three…

The necessity of a college degree is irrefutable. However, the path to college for undocumented students can be crowded with boulders, steep walls, or altogether non-existent. Drawing on interviews with 25 undocumented Latina/o students and 5 years (2012-2017) of school ethnography, I show that their college-going experiences are framed by the…

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on…

First-generation students often feel alone on college campuses. These students can find themselves excluded from organizations, traditions, and spaces that require financial, social, and cultural capital they may not have. In my Sociology of Work course, I use a family work history project to center and validate their experiences. Using census…

The uniformly positive view of social mobility in the United Kingdom overlooks the difficulties working-class young people have in reconciling a working-class background with the middle-class environments of the university and the professional labour market. But even more hidden are the subtle processes of exclusion and exclusivity that permeate…

The purpose of this article was to examine the effects of having an academic or student affairs professional mentor on working-class first-generation students' sense of belonging and resilience. The authors used propensity score matching techniques to develop matched pairs of working-class first-generation students who did and did not have a…

Despite efforts to foster a more equitable gender representation, Australia's higher education sector and workforce continue to be highly segregated. This article focusses on the gendered experiences of first-in-family (FIF) students--many who are from low-socioeconomic communities--transitioning to Australian universities. In terms of the…

As part of a wider study into the educational attitudes and experiences of white, working-class male pupils in the north of England, this paper explored the ways that male pupils in years 10 and 11 navigated and experienced the six-level (A-F) academic banding system present in their British mainstream secondary school (Ayrefield Community…

Young men from disadvantaged contexts are the least likely to attend university in Australia; furthermore, when they do attend, they are likely to struggle. This article draws on empirical data documenting the aspirations and resilience of first-in-family young men in Australian higher education, with the aim of nuancing their classed experience…

Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call "intermediate educational transitions." In this article, we examine a…

This study examines how first-generation (FG) college students make meaning of their social class during their first-year of college. As a method, photovoice allowed for the creation of a rich set of data using student photos and accompanying narratives, through which three key themes were derived: (a) broken American dream, (b) honoring family…

This article explores how first-in-family-graduate Roma and non-Roma Hungarians from the working-class experience education-driven social mobility and reconcile the dislocation of their primary-habitus due to changing class through transiting a "third space." Drawing on Bhabha's and bell hooks' development of this concept, we aim to…

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities,…

In this article we connect critical librarianship and its practices of information literacy (IL) with working-class experiences of higher education (HE). Although the research literature and professional body of knowledge of critical information literacy (CIL), is one of the most theoretically-developed areas of wider critical librarianship…