Are students classless? Prof Richard Scase argues the rise in luxury purpose-built student accommodation in places like Canterbury means social mixing among those of different economic backgrounds at university has become highly limited...

Academics won’t admit it, students won’t admit it, but the reality is that it is there. Social class divisions have always existed among the university student population.

Today it is even more evident; an interesting assertion when there is a general belief social class is a thing of the past. Even more so when there is a common view that going to university is a route for personal social mobility and an avenue to career success.

The higher education system has always been built upon the British class system. There has been the great divide between Oxford, Cambridge and the rest. With the growth of the 18-25 age group going to university, expanding from 5% in the 1960s to around 50% today, more refined divisions have emerged.

Instead of a binary divide, there is now a hierarchy of institutions, with the more prestigious ‘Russell Group’ universities ‘below’ Oxbridge and ‘above’ the rest. ‘The rest’ are also now ranked in terms of whether they were founded in the 1960s or post-millennium.

This may seem all rather academic (sic), but like all aspects of social class there are real outcomes for life chances and longer-term career prospects.

This is why governments trying to increase opportunities for young men and women concentrate on ‘opening-up’ Oxbridge colleges. These continue to be the recognised route for elite jobs in the professions, politics (as we know) and business. It reinforces a ‘closed’ society with limited social mobility for the rest.

The barriers to breaking this self-perpetuating cycle are, to say the least, challenging. A university degree is no longer enough for social mobility, or for even getting a job. It is more about from which university it was awarded.

What is important is the ‘brand’ of the institution. Year after year, students at the London School of Economics (LSE) complain about the quality of their university experience. How they rarely meet their lecturers, seminars are too large, etc. But the moment they graduate they are shouting with pride about how they are LSE graduates.

It is not the same for post-millennium university graduates. You have to dig deep to find out from them where they got their degrees.

The ‘elite’ universities install ways of behaviour and thinking in their students that global economic and political elites view as desirable and, therefore, very employable. Small group seminar teaching and one-to-one tutorials encourage student self-confidence, personal assertiveness, the ability to communicate and express ideas in coherent and convincing ways.

As the university system has expanded ‘the rest’ universities have increased the size of their seminar groups, abandoned tutorials and small group teaching. They have replaced these with PowerPoint handouts, rote-learned exam answers and ‘a course textbook’. The development of student creativity, the potential to develop emotional and cultural skills required by the ‘top’ employers has gone out of the window.

This is why so many students were not upset about online teaching in the pandemic. They could hardly tell the difference from their face-to-face lectures.

Some students claim the quality of the teaching improved because their lecturers had to ‘update’ their courses. Online teaching with ‘Zoom’ or ‘Teams’ caught them out! Students may have complained about their fees but not necessarily the academic experience that for many was much improved.

This is why online teaching is here to stay. The de-personalisation and the mass standardisation of the educational process have paved the way for this. The high-branded institutions have generally stuck to their centuries-old methods, but the greater majority of universities will change.

High student fees and a deteriorating educational experience will lead to a major surge in graduate apprenticeships. They will become the standard approach in ‘the rest’ universities.

The expansion of higher education in the UK over the past 60 years has created stronger class divisions within the university system. This has been assisted by major transformations in the economy. Large numbers of jobs that offered employment for graduates in the past have largely disappeared.

"Big corporations have moved into the market to meet student housing demand..."

Technology has reduced the need for layers of senior, middle and lower managers. Organisational hierarchies have been destroyed in both private and public sectors. A decade of austerity has constrained organisational recruitment processes for those jobs that were traditionally filled by graduates from ‘the rest’ universities.

Today, labour shortages are acute in skilled manual, technical and caring sectors of the economy; these ‘essential’ jobs that are under-paid, under-valued and often with poor working conditions. They should be better rewarded and much higher up the pay leagues. These jobs require more skills than ever. But graduates regard them as somehow beneath their dignity - ‘I didn’t go to university to be a bus driver’.

But why go to university? Consider the skills required of driving an HGV truck down narrow streets in the UK’s congested cities and towns. Think of the risks and the decisions that have to be made? Not a job good enough for graduates? Social class assumptions shape our thinking about these jobs that the pandemic and its praise for essential workers has led to a re-evaluation.

The growth of higher education has made the sector big business. The pay of vice-chancellors reflects this. The 500,000 students that flow across the country shape the character of towns and cities.

This huge number has re-defined local housing markets, creating business opportunities for buy-to-let landlords and employment for workers in the building, maintenance and service industries. Students are underwriters of towns and cities’ night-time economies and more than that, shaping the very nature of our high streets. Canterbury is a prime example with its nail parlours, hairdressing salons, cafes and bars.

This inflated student market has attracted large property companies. Buy-to-let landlords are no longer solely local residents with one or two houses rented out for their pension incomes.

Big corporations have moved into the market to meet student housing demand. They construct high-rise blocks of apartments, consisting of en-suite units with luxury hotel-standard communal areas including lounges, cinemas and often swimming pools.

The students that can afford to live in these are often from rich overseas families. But not just them, they are also rented by UK-based students with affluent parents who can pay their rents and later, pay-off their debts.

Meanwhile, students from less privileged backgrounds have to make do with either on-campus accommodation (that can be very good) or more likely in the converted rental two-up, two-down houses offered by private landlords.

This means the social mixing between students from different class backgrounds is highly limited; certainly by comparison with the sharing of corridors in the traditional student halls of residence.

"It encouraged personal relations between young men and women from diverse families that is no longer evident in the ‘mass production’ systems of higher education..."

In the old days, the interaction between students from different social backgrounds was greater because of the smaller seminar classes and small group teaching.

It encouraged personal relations between young men and women from diverse families that is no longer evident in the ‘mass production’ systems of higher education. This spills over in the shaping of friendship groups and recreational, leisure pursuits.

‘Mates’ and ‘friends’ are more likely to reproduce society’s broader social class divisions instead of reducing them.

This is in an economy where 50% of the age group are going to university when job vacancies are at a 20-year high. Today, there are 1.2 million unfilled vacancies when registered students are saying: “I don’t know why I’m at uni.”

Perhaps a major legacy of the pandemic will be a levelling-up of the rewards and status of essential workers’ jobs, bringing them closer to the pay and social regard of others.

This could mark a fundamental shift in the British class structure that the expansion of mass higher education has failed to achieve.

*Richard Scase is Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent. He is the author of Higher Education and Corporate Realities (Routledge) that anticipated these trends.

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