Fitting In and Getting On

Abstract

of each institution and the students' sense of fi t within the environment. The chapter then discusses the ways in which students are positioned to draw upon, and develop, forms of capital, particularly highlighting the hypermobilization of capital of the middle-class students at UWE. Working-class students are in a minority at the University of Bristol, and when they are found they tend to be from the upper working-classes (few students in our study had parents from NS-SEC category 7). According to HESA, in 2010 (the year the students entered HE), only 14 % of the undergraduate intake of University of Bristol students were from NS-SEC categories 4-7, which broadly correlates with working-class backgrounds, as discussed in Chapter 2. The national average in England for this particular year's intake of students from these categories is 31 %. Not only are these students in a minority at the University of Bristol, but they are under-represented at the university when compared with the national picture of working-class university attendance. We were interested in understanding how it feels to be a student for three years at an institution where much of the population is highly privileged. Much has been made of the sense of 'not belonging' for working-class students confronted with elite university experience (Reay 1998; Reay et al. 2009, 2010; Crozier and Reay 2011), and we wished to explore how, and if, these feelings remain or shift over the student life course. Initially, we discerned some familiar patterns of experience, supporting the fi ndings of previous studies. When confronted with the extreme privilege of the University of Bristol and its high proportion of privately educated and wealthy students , many of our working-class students indeed felt themselves to be 'fi sh out of water'. The reasons for these feelings were diffi cult for the students to pin down; it was more of a sense of not being quite the 'right' sort of person , or of being a 'body out of place' (Puwar 2004; The Res-Sisters 2016). As one participant, Samantha, put it, 'it's like unwritten rules', which appear to operate as constraints on behaviour and social mixing: When we went on the fi eld trip at the very beginning of the year to get to know each other, I was one of the few people from a state school, and