Contextualizing rationality: Mature student carers and higher education in England

Abstract

In England, the Government has implemented policies to increase and diversify participation in higher education (HE). Changes in funding arrangements that shift the burden of paying for education from the state to individuals have also been introduced. To reconcile the contradiction between widening participation and the individualization of the costs of study, HE is being framed as a risk-free and individualized financial investment. Informed by critiques from feminist economics and the philosophy of “rational economic man,” this paper argues that the government's HE policies are permeated by a narrow concept of reason and presuppose highly individualized, instrumental, and economic actors. Drawing on the findings from two studies conducted at the University of Hull, this paper demonstrates how this understanding of human behavior is incongruent with the experiences of one group of students – mature student carers – whose life choices are informed by their caring responsibilities.

Key Words:

• Higher education
• mature students
• rational economic man
• care
• gender
• rationality
• JEL Codes: I28, J16, I2

Notes

¹Since political devolution to Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, responsibility for much of HE policy, including arrangements for its funding, has been devolved to the national assemblies or parliaments. In this article, we focus only on England.

²The lower debt level of a student receiving the full maintenance grant is because the amount received in the grant is offset against the amount that can be borrowed for maintenance pound for pound up to £1,200 (DfES 2006).

³Many anti-feminist thinkers and a few feminist ones have claimed that the differences in the styles of thinking are due to biology (see Tuana [1993]). Within feminism, it is more popular to support that if there are differences in the styles of thinking between men and women, it is due to nurture or to the different positions that men and women occupy in society (see Nancy Chodorow [1978]). The acknowledgment of different styles of thinking is usually linked to the revaluation of the female style of thinking, which has traditionally been considered inferior. For instance, Carol Gilligan (1982) challenges the idea that certain moral styles of reasoning (which are more often encountered in women) are appropriate only for earlier stages of human psychological development. Linda Nicholson (1999), however, argues that Gilligan's study fails to account for variables other than gender that would have been important in the development of her thesis.

⁴Alison Jaggar 1989; Miranda Fricker 1991; Martha Nussbaum 1994; Alcoff 1995–6; Alessandra Tanesini 1999; Stella Gonzalez-Arnal 2003; Paul Gilbert and Kathleen Lennon 2005.

⁵While neither of the two studies set out explicitly to examine the impact of caring on students' experiences, subsequent analyses of the data revealed that caregiving status was a strong differentiator of student experience.

⁶The categories selected for study differ from those policy includes as widening-participation (see p.13) since we included students from minority ethnic backgrounds, and we did not target students from disadvantaged socioeconomic areas. The latter were excluded for methodological reasons: These students are defined by their postcode, but this is not always an indication of the socioeconomic background of a student; we had difficulties accessing the data at university level; and students are often unaware of their classification into this group and do not self-identify as “non-traditional students” (Kilkey and Page 2001: 19). In the interviews it became clear that a number of students who belonged to the other targeted groups also belonged to this category of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic areas.

⁷And, by extension, not all student carers are mature.

⁸Unfortunately, data on students' caregiving status is not routinely collected by universities or relevant national bodies in the UK, and a government-funded study of mature students (Ross et al. 2002) did not examine them along this dimension.

⁹Numbers of BME mature students in the quantitative study are thus too small to analyze by caregiving status. The qualitative study purposefully sought to recruit BME students to its sample, and it did so by checking the personal data of students held by the university, which includes information on ethnicity. On this basis, three BME students were interviewed. A fourth student had refused to give information about her ethnicity in her personal statement to the university, and in her interview she declared that she did not fit into any of the university's pre-defined categories of ethnicity.

¹⁰For example, Pat Davies and Jenny Williams (2001); Pat Davies, Mike Osborne, and Jenny Williams (2002); Diane Reay, Stephen Ball, and Miriam David (2002); Merryn Hutchings (2003); Diane Reay (2003); and Jacky Brine and Richard Waller (2004).

¹¹Nick Adnett and Gwen Coates 2000; Muriel Egerton and Garreth Parry 2001; Carole Leathwood and Merryn Hutchings 2003; MacLeod 2003; Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) 2007.

¹²Louise Archer 2003; Leathwood and Hutchings 2003; MacLeod 2003; Jacky Brine and Richard Waller 2004.

¹³Muslims and Sikhs and those from black and minority ethnic groups have also been found to be among the most debt averse (Callender 2003).

¹⁴See Katharina Rowold (1996) for an illustration of some of these debates in our intellectual tradition.