Source: Alamy

Climb every mountain: well-to-do students at less prestigious universities may become extracurricular overachievers

Middle-class students at post-1992 universities are fighting to preserve their class status by throwing themselves into extracurricular activities to build an impressive CV, a new study claims.

While several studies have considered how working-class students felt at elite universities, researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Birmingham have turned their attention to how middle-class students fare at less prestigious, modern universities.

The Paired Peers study has followed 90 students - 45 from the University of the West of England and 45 from the University of Bristol - from the start of their studies almost three years ago to see how students from different social backgrounds react to life at different types of university.

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Students from an affluent, middle-class background often felt socially ¡°out of place¡± at UWE, while others agonised over their inability to gain a place at a more prestigious university, the study found.

One student named ¡°Oscar¡± quoted in the report says studying at a post- 1992 university is ¡°academically¡­a big torment to me [at not having achieved my potential]¡±, while he says he evades questions from others about his alma mater by saying he ¡°went to university in Bristol¡±.

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Presenting the Leverhulme Trust-funded study on 5 April at the British Sociological Association¡¯s annual conference in London, Nicola Ingram, a research associate at Bath, said: ¡°Those with high levels of cultural capital felt very out of place.

¡°Some felt UWE was right for them, but others were ¡®fish out of water¡¯. Some were fighting to maintain their middle-class position.¡±

To do so, many middle-class students interviewed were ¡°hyper-mobilising¡± - running sports or social clubs, gaining internships - to burnish their CVs to stand out, Dr Ingram explained.

¡°These students are overcompensating for being at an institution that does not give them the symbolic capital they want to have,¡± she said.

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Dr Ingram said one of her interviewees, ¡°Francesca¡±, the daughter of an Oxbridge professor - who is studying law at UWE having missed out on the universities of Exeter, Sussex and Kent after getting two Bs and a C at A level - illustrated how middle-class students sought to hyper- mobilise.

¡°She was very unhappy about going to UWE and, in her first year, thought about going somewhere else,¡± Dr Ingram said.

¡°Then something happened. She did lots of internships and seized every opportunity she could. She went to Australia to do an internship and was employing all her social capital - she is really going for it.¡±

Dr Ingram, who co-authored the paper Not the Place for a Person Like Me: On Being Middle-Class at a Post-1992 University in England, also said that the study showed how middle-class students ¡°knew how to play the game better¡± when looking for their first job after graduation.

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Comparing the job-hunting success of two students in the Paired Peers scheme, she added: ¡°Both had the same aspirations, but the working-class student did not have any social contacts, while the middle-class student used his family and is starting a ?40,000 job in a few weeks.¡±

jack.grove@tsleducation.com