Trajectories of University Access and Experiences: a study of working- class students in England and Portugal

Despite the expansion of higher education, social inequalities in access persist in countries such as England and Portugal, where the working class faces socioeconomic barriers, especially in more competitive institutions and courses (Almeida et al., 2012; Marginson, 2006). The aims of this thesis are to describe not only the barriers to accessing higher education but also to map possible paths of access, identifying through the comparative study the conditions under which better access and less excluding experiences can be achieved. This thesis is based on the analysis of 30 cases of working-class students who obtained access to high-status undergraduate courses in medicine and law at universities in England and Portugal. Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and capital are used as theoretical support to observe how access may be occurring and how these students are experiencing the university. The results suggest that the possession of different forms of capitals (cultural, economic and social) can facilitate access, and the absence of these can, on the other hand, lead to greater reliance on expansion policies or create less favourable conditions. These factors are also responsible for the creation of diverse experiences, where the presence or lack of capital will define patterns of belonging to the field and ways of observing class disparities. This is largely due to the functioning of the institutional habitus of each institution, course and country, and how each context responds to inequalities of access through its policies. It was verified, however, that cultural capital emerges as a potentially important capital between access experiences, between courses and between the two countries. However, what has been observed in Portugal is that the formation of cultural capital can be greatly facilitated by state schools through the provision of institutionalised cultural capital and that students in general feel very well qualified to enter university. In England, in contrast, students often resort to selective schools to acquire better access conditions and end up having more barriers to access when combined with lack of economic and social capital, especially in courses such as medicine. When observing the relationship between the possession of these capitals and their experiences among the institutions in which participants studied, what is identified is that in Portuguese institutions, since cultural capital is a highly valued capital in institutions in general, it can facilitate the experiences of those who possess it. And that, together with the provision of scholarships and very low tuition fees, they end up having a greater sense of belonging than those observed in English institutions. In England, what was observed was that institutions make inequality between classes much more evident, being very stratified, where factors such as class, race and ethnicity end up being very relevant to the sense of belonging in these fields, and that when combined with the absence of economic support from families, they end up creating a feeling of exclusion. This also provided an intersectional analysis between class, race, ethnicity, and gender as factors that need to be evaluated together to observe how they function as capital within the context of education and how they can differentiate between the two countries. What this thesis demonstrates, therefore, is that although inequalities in access are still persistent in both national contexts, access experiences can be favoured through policies that encourage a strengthening of the cultural capital formation of working-class students, combined with the provision of scholarships, promoting diversity in the elite academic field to make it a legitimate field for everyone who wants to access it.