Regional structures of feeling? A spatially and socially differentiated analysis of UK student im/mobility

Abstract

This article explores the patterning of student im/mobility internally within the United Kingdom, using exceptionally detailed student records data on full-time undergraduate entrants from 2014. For this cohort of students, geographic mobility was clearly the preserve of the most socio-economically advantaged, and was less common for Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups. Significantly, the student’s ‘home’ region emerges as the most important factor driving im/mobility even when social, ethnic and educational differences are held constant. The concept ‘structures of feeling’ can help make sense of immobility in areas of the North-East, North-West and Wales, where students are likely to look on higher education choice through a different lens of accumulated and contemporary, inter-generational cultural experience. Exploring exceptions to the dominant trends, we also find a more complex patterning of im/mobility that is likely to reflect the deep historical and structural framing of young people’s socio-spatial horizons.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• higher education
• place
• regional identity
• social class
• ethnicity

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank members of the project's Stakeholder Group and the Spatial Modelling Group at the University of Bristol for their very helpful suggestions in developing this work. Thanks also go to Tony Hoare and Caroline Wright as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes

1. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right (2014).

2. Model 2 was chosen to allow us to examine the geography of outlier residuals without including region in the model itself. The standardised residuals mapped in Figure 2 vary between –1.96 and –4.90, but –4.22 is actually the lowest value.

3. This reinforces work done elsewhere showing the partial alignment of the British-Indian middle class with conventional educational practices of White British middle-class students (Abbas 2007).

4. Herstories is a phrase from feminist historical analysis which aims to challenge the implicit bias of history and its focus on men.