‘Seize That Chance!’ Leaving Home and Transitions to Higher Education

Abstract

This paper interrogates assumptions surrounding the practices of leaving home and going to higher education in England and Wales. As more students from non-traditional backgrounds are encouraged to go to university, this is leading to greater diversity in students’ experiences of university life, and one of the key aspects of this is that more students are choosing to stay at home for the duration of their studies. This paper explores how and why students make the decision to stay at home. While recognising the financial advantages of living at home we argue that the decision cannot be reduced to economic expediency, but reflects young people's access to legitimate cultural capital and family and peer endorsement of leaving home as an expected process and outcome of going to university.

Notes

The research for this paper is supported by ERSC research grant R000223985. The authors would like to thank Sue Byrne of the Computing Support Services, University of Liverpool, for her invaluable assistance in publishing the online questionnaire. They would also like to express their thanks to all of the students who have taken part in this research, in whatever way, and for so generously giving of their time.

Although more students from social classes III (manual), IV and V are entering HE than was the case 10 years ago (19 per cent in 2001–02 compared with 11 per cent in 1990–91), their participation is still considerably lower than young people from middle-class backgrounds, whose participation has increased from 35 to 50 per cent over the same period (Summerfield & Babb 2004, p. 45).

Experiences of Student Life Survey, The University of Liverpool, December 2002.

Social class was defined using a combination of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification eight-category model, family experience of HE and fee remission status. We fitted different variables to capture parental socio-economic class, including mother's occupational class and highest class; however, the variable for father's class contributed the biggest reduction in the –2 Log Likelihood, and we have retained this variable.

Although we utilise parental experience of HE as a proxy for cultural capital for both analysis of the survey data and as a way of distinguishing the family backgrounds of the interviewees, we recognise that the concept of cultural capital cannot be reduced to institutionalised forms, such as the attainment of educational qualifications. In the analysis of the interview transcripts we incorporate more embodied forms that are manifested through competences and dispositions.

Respondents are identified by their pseudonym, age (for HE students), whether HE or sixth form (6thF) student, residential status for HE students (LH, left home; LWP, living with parents) and whether first-generation (FG) or second-generation (SG) students.