Framing the geographies of higher education participation: schools, place and national identity

Abstract

This paper considers the role of schools, place and national identity in shaping the ways in which young people make sense of the geography of higher education choice in the Welsh context. Drawing on two recent qualitative studies, it illustrates how attachment to nationhood and localities, as well as the internal processes of schools, bear upon the geographical mobility of young people living in Wales. The analyses suggest that this choice making process, and the ways in which young people rationalised these decisions about where to study, varies according to where they lived and which school they attended. The paper illustrates the importance of moving beyond exclusively social-class based analyses of university choice making and embracing the significance of school and place in young people's geographical mobility. Keywords: geography of higher education, student mobility, schools, place, national identity IntroductionRising rates of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK have been paralleled by an increasing proportion of students studying at their local higher education institutions (HEIs) (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2014). This trend has been attributed, in part, to the increase in working-class students in HE who are proportionately more likely to study locally than their more socially advantaged peers (Holdsworth, 2009;Patiniotis and Holdsworth, 2005). In explaining these patterns of mobility in relation to HE researchers in the UK (Ball et al, 2002), and indeed internationally (McDonough 1997), have tended to foreground the social and cultural contexts in which young people are situated, and the material, social and cultural resources (or capitals) they draw upon, as explanatory The dominant explanation for the inequalities in student mobility lies in cultural (or social) reproduction theories, namely those associated with the works of Pierre Bourdieu.Researchers working with this framework have shown that, in addition to material constraints which determine young people's geographical mobility from home to university (e.g. the financial costs of travel and student accommodation), psychological constraints also operate in the form of individual 'habitus'. Habitus according to Reay et al (2001) is structured by 'conditions of existence ' (Bourdieu, 1990) during childhood socialisation and informs young people's dispositions, orientations, and emotional responses towards HE (Reay et al., 2001;Archer and Hutchings, 2000, Ball et al., 2002).This has a significant bearing on the ways in which young people make choices about HE including their attitude toward locality and leaving home and 'going away' to university (Hinton, 2011;Christie, 2007;Reay et al., 2001). Young people with little in the way of family resources of knowledge and experience of HE to draw upon are more likely to construct the HE arena as something that is 'not for the likes of me' and thus position themselves outside HE (Archer and Hutchings, 2000). Conversely, where the transition to HE is a normative trajectory within ...

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