Are freshers’ week activities too middle class?

The framing of those within the higher education sector as “elites” or even “citizens of nowhere” elides a growing number of students with firmly working class backgrounds choosing HE study. But how does the experience of entering university suit them? Not well, it seems.

In marketing speak, these would be those with C2DE parents rather than ABC1. These terms derived from the National Readership Survey (NRS) have a long history, spanning 50 years. We see the binary split so often we almost forget the subgradations:

A different class

To be honest, these definitions (now maintained by the Market Research Society) are showing their age. Since the advent of John Major’s “classless society”, and the advent of new roles (where would a web designer sit?) we have shied away as a nation from definitions of social class as useful concepts in understanding society. In HE data we are more likely to look at POLAR (likelihood of young people attending HE) or IMDs (income and other factors) in identifying “hard to reach” groups.

So it is rare to see NRS applied to a HE dataset, and even rarer to see the detailed split. For this reason I leapt at the chance to dive in to the recent Unite/HEPI/YouthSight data set which included detail on this very issue, and related it to the initial experiences of those entering HE.

The survey was completed by 2,535 university applicants and 2, 573 first year undergraduate students, and responses were weighted to ensure a representative samples of the UK undergraduate population. The weighting and the comparatively large sample size make it safer to use such detailed splits, but I would treat findings as indicative of trends only.

The big problem with the population as a whole is that there are comparatively low numbers of students from a group E background – just under 3.4% of the total. This subset does show some interesting results, but we need to be careful in our interpretation. On the visualisation the grey pie chart shows the proportion of each group in the responses to the selected question. A lighter grey means we need to be more careful in associating significance to a result.

The survey happened in April, so I am not sure how non-continuing students were compensated for – you’d expect (based on POLAR data) that much number of students from C2DE backgrounds would leave their course in the first year than those from ABC1 backgrounds.

Freshers’ week

The first week at university is sometimes seen, by misty eyed nineties graduates, as a never-to-be-repeated bacchanal. The drinking, partying, and casual sex is no longer as central as it once was – but is even the new, kinder, freshers still irredeemably middle class?

From the data it appears so. Students from progressively less middle-class backgrounds are much less likely to participate in organised events, and those that do are less likely to enjoy the experience. Though – as above – the sample size is low, the difference is particularly notable for those with a group E background.

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This prompts important questions – what might these students be doing during freshers that might be different from other groups, and what might be the impact?

Though the differences are not really significant those from C2DE backgrounds did seem slightly more likely to attend a lecture or go to the library – suggesting that the social aspect of university is seen as less important than the academic aspect (though, they are slightly more likely to take illegal drugs during freshers’ week0. It is possible that a lack of social knowledge could contribute to this.

University aims

There’s a sharp difference in motivations for going to university. For those from C2DE backgrounds, achieving financial stability is paramount. It would be fair to suggest that students from these groups are more likely to have experienced or witnessed financial instability in a family or friendship context. These students are also more likely to cite a desire to leave home as a reason to attend university

Students from a group D or E background are also more likely to describe themselves as an unsuccessful student, or to be unsure what the notion of a successful student means (although polling on this does not show these students as using sharply differing criteria than others). They are also less likely to consider themselves as a very successful student.

There’s also a greater likelihood that those from a C2DE background will make friends on their course than through the other major routes (in accommodation, from student societies). Applicants with parents in groups C2 and D are less likely to intend to join societies, or to not have thought about the idea. Again this feels like cultural capital – a lack of understanding of the place of student societies in university life, or a lack of university experienced family or friends.

All of this contributes to anxiety – and, sure enough, those from C2, and especially D or E, backgrounds report as being slightly more anxious on a day to day basis.

The visualisations

You’ll see that there are a load of questions and statements that you can look at through this lens, and I’ve also included as many splits as are available. They are all accessible via the embedded chart above. However, if you use the splits do keep an eye on the pie-chart… if it all goes pale grey then you are on shaky statistical ground looking at low sample sizes.