Conference Program

Existing research highlights how privileged groups emphasise the role of talent and effort as explanations for individual success in meritocratic selection (e.g., Brown et al., 2016; Gogescu, 2025; Warikoo and Fuhr, 2014). Studies suggest that the ways elites understand inequality and success are influenced by the channels or characteristics of education institutions through which elite recruitment predominantly occurs (e.g. Friedman et al., 2024; Gogescu, 2025; Warikoo, 2018). However, the literature has largely focused on justifications for selection processes within specific institutions and elite entry routes, paying less attention to how the “winners” of these systems conceptualise the distribution of educational opportunities as a whole and understand the opportunities available to others, as Gogescu (2025) notes.

This ongoing study takes a distinctive approach by exploring how undergraduate students at a highly prestigious UK university perceive the causes and consequences of the distribution of educational opportunities, as well as the policies they are willing to support. Using interviews and an interactive task with movable components, participants visualise their perceptions of how educational opportunities are currently distributed and how they believe they should be distributed across different levels of the higher education system. This task enables an in-depth examination of inequality as unequal resource distribution, rendering abstract notions of opportunity distribution more tangible (Summers et al., 2022).

Preliminary findings, available for the conference, will illuminate how students' socio-economic backgrounds and educational experiences shape their views. It will offer insights into perceptions of fairness and the distribution of opportunities in higher education from the top.

Recent studies suggest that the relationship between higher education and normative visions of ‘the good life’ has become increasingly problematic (Brooks et al., 2025), with some arguing that the promise of social mobility through university is nothing more than a “fantasy rhetoric” (Bathmaker et al., 2016, p. ix). In today’s volatile labour markets, the symbolic and material value of higher education is eroding, raising questions about students’ declining belief in the university ‘game’ – especially for those seeking upward mobility through education.

This talk will interrogate the complexity of first-in-family (FiF) students’ investment and persistence in contemporary higher education. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio (Bourdieu, 1990), we will use an empirical case - the story of Zoe who is an undergraduate student in Australia - to show that ‘staying in the game’ of university education is a multi-layered process shaped by moments of rupture, recalibration and reinvestment, as well as shifts in the meaning ascribed to higher education. By illuminating the fragility and volatility of first-in-family students’ journeys through higher education, we will explore how they experience the promise of meritocracy and the implications of struggles within their everyday lives. We will also show how their experienced during studies reshape their expectation for the future.

Degrees of value: Cultivating privilege at an elite university

This study examines how students at the London School of Economics (LSE) perceive the value of their university degree. While existing research in Sociology of Education has focused on strategies used by pupils to secure access to prestigious schools and universities (Kosunen and Seppänen, 2015; van Zanten, 2019), less is known about strategies used during time at university to gain positional advantage. This is a highly relevant research topic, as recent university graduates are facing unfavourable social mobility prospects (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2018), while attending elite education favours, but no longer guarantees elite outcomes (Wakeling and Savage, 2015). The research employs mixed methods, combining a survey of second- and third- year undergraduates with follow-up in-depth interviews. The survey captures students’ perceived educational gains, priorities during university, as well as beliefs about factors influencing success at university and in the labour market. Students with different profiles — defined by the goals prioritised and their understanding of success —were selected for in-depth interviews. Findings show how under perceived conditions of social congestion (Brown, 2013), students approach elite higher education as a site for cultivating multiple forms of graduate capital (Tomlinson, 2017). Even though many respondents tended to emphasise ‘knowing the right people’ as most important for getting a good graduate job, this did not seem to influence their priorities during university. Even though social congestion made students more cynical about the meritocratic nature of the hiring process, this perspective did not permeate their understanding of the value of their university degree. Their narratives alternated between doubts about the meritocratic claims of hiring processes and faith in meritocracy as an organising ideal of higher education. Instead of being seen as hollowing out students’ academic endeavours, early career development could be understood as an overlapping priority.

Meritocracy and social mobility are grounded in a universal, unified and unifying understanding of high and low, up and down. Whereas a plethora of evidence, beginning with Bourdieu and Passeron (1979), debunked meritocratic ideologies, conceptualisations of social mobilities remain static: The goals of the upwardly mobile are presented as objective positions in the social space and accordingly accessible if enough relevant (forms of) capitals are accumulated.

Highly relevant at the time and place of its conception and publication (France at the dusk of the “golden age of capitalism”), this basic Bourdieusian understanding faces short-comings when applied to higher education (HE) in contemporary post-migrant societies after educational expansion. A way forward are Atkinson’s (2016) amendments of capitals as recognition, relationality, and historic rationalisation: factoring in the necessity of recognition by the ruling class; the dynamic of relationality and thus accelerated inflation of capitals; and the efficacy of domination through historic rationalisation, we must reconsider the function of HE for social reproduction and our understanding of social mobility.

Firstly, the socially mobile start from shaky grounds. Increased HE enrolment and educational mobility was – at least in OECD countries –accompanied by devaluations of hitherto valuable capitals, and increased educational attainment is driven and simultaneously drives credential inflation (Bourdieu 2008). Attainable goals however become fluid, since it is harder to constitute successful upward mobility. This is on the one hand driven by the reciprocal academisation of professions and professionalisation of academia (Stock et al. 2023). On the other hand, we can observe a moving of the goal posts as an act of domination and exclusion: without the right pedigree there is no access to elite positions (Friedman and Laurison 2019).

This can, secondly, be understood only by reconsidering the second part of capital theory: interchangeability. The theorem relies on a unified market where all participants are equally eligible to exchange economic for cultural capital and vice versa. However, like labour markets, markets for capital exchange are highly fragmented and for the disadvantaged, changing the marketplace comes with worse exchange rates or high fees. Since the disadvantaged cannot pay these fees, (intergenerational) social mobility becomes incomplete or fragmented. HE bears special responsibility in this regard, since it alters and accelerates this “alienating universalisation” inherent to education systems in capitalist states (Bourdieu 2020). Thus, (public) HE was never an engine for climbing the social ladder up to the elite echelons, but a tool for the (re)arrangement of intermediate and transclasse (Jaquet 2023) positions.

While this does not provide or bolster educational justice, we argue that there is a point in turning the system against itself. Contemporary elite (formation) is hardly dependent on reproduction through (public) HE institutions but recruits itself from political and economic networks, heavily inclined to the (far) right. Instead, the sector of the democratic public most dependent on HE nowadays has become civil society: from Chile to Germany, from Santiago to Riesa and Gießen, students, often in negligence of individual social mobility, have (once again) become the vanguards and vigilantes of social progress.

In the UK, universities are seen as a key driver of social mobility (Brooks et al. 2025; Reay 2021) with meritocratic discourses around aspiration and hard work underpinning decades of widening access and participation initiatives across successive governments (Harrison and Waller 2018). Celebratory narratives point to the increasing percentage of young people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds attending university each year, and the position of young women – who outnumber their male counterparts by 52% to 40% (Bolton and Lewis 2025) –as meritocracy’s winners; hard working, savvy and entrepreneurial (Allen and Finn 2024). Notwithstanding data on women’s participation, and the vocal concerns about young men ‘missing out’ on the promises of meritocracy via university (Hilman 2025), recently there has been significant and growing attention on inequalities within the university experience relating to an increasing number of students taking on paid employment during study (Neves et al. 2025; Adams 2024). In both wider policy discourse and academic literature, ‘earning while learning’ (hereafter, EwL) is typically presented in binary terms; as positive for developing young people’s labour market experience and ‘employability’, or as hindering students’ ability to fully engage in their academic studies and risking their degree outcomes and future prospects. Given that women graduates are already likely to earn 6% lower than male graduates one year after study (Bolton and Lewis 2025), the impact of EwL on the apparent winners of meritocracy needs further interrogation.

To do this, this paper draws on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded, mixed-methods study (2022-2026) that examines patterns of EwL in England longitudinally, and through young women’s own narratives of working during full-time education and their earliest post-study labour market experiences. We present our data to show that women students are 50% more likely than men to undertake EwL and whilst there is very little difference in pay for men and women, this is because student pay is generally low for all (Zhong et al 2025). Whilst our quantitative findings highlight classed, raced and gendered inequalities in engagement in EwL, they show that working while in university does not impact the quality of degree outcomes nor occupation. However, for young women, working long-hours during university lowers the likelihood of progression into senior roles. The paper moves from these headlines into a deeper interrogation of young women’s everyday experiences of EwL through analysis of 16 focus groups that reveals the struggles of women students’ early exposure to poor pay, abuse and burnout (Hardy et al. 2026) but also how these sit in tension with the ways EwL brings opportunities for agency and social connection and independence. The paper illuminates how the diverse experiences and structuring of EwL in England shapes women’s negotiations of, and cruel attachments to (Berlant 2011), meritocratic discourses of success both in the present and the future.

Merit-based admission systems frame access to higher education as the outcome of individual effort and academic achievement, suggesting that opportunities should be allocated fairly on the basis of merit (Mijs, 2016; Reay, 2020). However, access remains deeply stratified, with students unevenly distributed across institutions and programs with different levels of prestige and selectivity, reproducing inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity (Brunner & Labraña, 2020; McCowan, 2016). Academic performance hierarchically classifies applicants while legitimizing these differences as merit, even though achievement itself is shaped by social origin and educational inequalities (Liu, 2011; Reay, 2021). Educational choices, in turn, cannot be understood as purely individual decisions but as relational processes shaped by the interaction between social structures, institutional arrangements and students' dispositions (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997).

In Ecuador, despite higher education reforms introduced in 2010 aimed at democratizing access, including tuition-free public university education and affirmative action policies for historically excluded groups, inequalities persist and barriers remain for Indigenous and low-income students (Ponce & Carrasco, 2017; Rivera, 2019).

This paper explores how, despite high academic performance, students from historically excluded groups navigate the tensions between the promise of meritocratic access and the social constraints that shape their educational choices and horizons of possibility. Drawing on a qualitative approach, the study uses data from 26 semi-structured interviews with affirmative action students who achieved high scores in the national admission exam at the Universidad Central del Ecuador.

The findings identify four distinct logics of university choice, structured around orientations toward risk and the future. A maximization logic leads students to strategically pursue highly selective programs through knowledge of admission rules and family pressure toward prestigious careers. An entry assurance logic prioritizes securing admission over preferred programs, driven by perceptions of the process as uncertain and limited knowledge of the system. A confidence in entry logic involves lower systemic tension and more vocational decisions, although self-limitation emerges through perceptions of personal ability. These three logics share individualised and positional orientations toward the future, distancing students from the structural conditions shaping their trajectories and resonating with meritocratic narratives.

A fourth logic operates differently. More frequently articulated by women and Indigenous students, it frames career choices in relation to collective experiences, community commitments and transformative aspirations, challenging the individualised and positional terms through which meritocratic futures are typically constructed (Webb & Sepúlveda, 2020).

Taken together, these findings show that access to selective university programs cannot be understood solely as the outcome of individual merit or instrumental decision-making, but as a relational and socially conditioned process. Moreover, the experiences of affirmative action students in their transition to higher education reveal the limits of policies focused exclusively on distributive or compensatory mechanisms of access, and the need to incorporate broader conceptions of justice that attend to recognition (Fraser, 2008) and the relational dimensions through which educational choices and transitions are constructed (Lynch et al., 2021).