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This paper explores the experiences of new migrants in Australian higher education, based on interviews conducted across two regional university campuses in 2017. New migrants, particularly from refugee backgrounds, often have limited university access and face specific challenges throughout and beyond their university experiences. Under-representation has led to a focus on what new migrants lack, in particular their putative paucity of cultural capital required to navigate and succeed in higher education. It is institutions, however, which frequently lack the willingness or capacity to recognise various strengths and forms of capital possessed by ethnically diverse students. Adopting a critical race theory lens enables identification of those forms of student capital, along with the barriers that may prevent capital from being widely recognised within the academy and/or being fully realised for students in their navigation of work, study, and life. Specifically, this article examines the value of resistant, familial and linguistic capital. New migrant students face specific challenges when their cultural strengths meet institutional and broader structural barriers. It is critical for institutions that the diverse and complex perspectives of under-represented students be harnessed to increase the quality of learning for all students. Compositional diversity on campus is necessary but insufficient to promote deep learning and a positive student experience.

This article employs a psychosocial analysis to discuss ways that working-class students interpret their struggles at university as personal inferiority rather than as disadvantage. Using life-story interviews from a qualitative study of Australian university graduates, it examines working-class students’ negotiation of university culture and their own identities. The article makes use of a legal term, inherent vice, to describe a process in which individuals and institutions are disposed to viewing lower levels of cultural capital in working-class students as an indication of their ‘natural’ inferiority, rather than as disadvantages of inheritable, symbolic resources. Working-class students employ significant forms of ‘resistance’ to develop their own resources and resourcefulness. However, they do not have equal access to what Skeggs refers to as techniques of selfhood required by the dominant symbolic in the field in which they are engaged. Building on Bourdieu’s development of cultural capital, habitus clivé, and symbolic violence, these findings challenge deficit views of working-class students. They also raise questions about the responsibility of higher education institutions in understanding and equipping working-class students with the necessary resources, rather than relying on students to have been born with the ‘right’ background.

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Current research on socioeconomic mobility documents difficulties upwardly mobile people encounter at university and in professional work environments. However, early-life experiences of family, home and community are largely overlooked as a primary point of inquiry. This article examines accounts of early family life given by upwardly mobile Australians to consider the ways class processes impact family beginnings and life trajectories. The in-depth interviews discussed here reveal that the negotiation of differing class cultures begins during childhood, in the home and community. This is illustrated most clearly through reflections on a sense of belonging (or not), and on material and cultural dynamics of youth. These narratives challenge widely accepted notions of homogeneous working-class socialisation, and require a broader understanding of the complex ways in which the upwardly mobile negotiate relationships and identity. These are narratives of what happens when origins and ambitions are seemingly at odds.