‘I’ve changed in every possible way someone could change’ – transformative university transitions

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a longitudinal research project that followed the undergraduate entrants of 2013 into, and through their university time, this paper provides a novel conceptualisation of transformative transitions via looking at the four dimensions of non-linearity, multiplicity, diversity and structure. To do so, it builds on Archer’s (2000, 2003, 2012) relational realist approach and work on reflexivity to show how students select and merge a diverse set of personal concerns to arrive at a modus vivendi. This capstone paper closes a series of publications from a four-year tracking study that collected interview data from a diverse group of 40 students on a yearly basis (n₁=40, n₂=40, n₃=38, n₄=33) at an English northern red brick university. The paper explores the changing focus of student experiences, from the social aspects of acclimatisation, to learning to be academic, and finally, becoming a graduate. The results presented here also point to the structural enablements and constraints that higher education institutions and policymakers should mitigate in responding to the inequalities of access and experience. In the context of a large-scale societal crisis, such as the ongoing pandemic, it is key that we understand how university can remain a transformative experience for all students.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• student transitions
• graduate transitions
• social inequalities
• student experience
• widening participation

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to those who made an important mark on our lives, but we lost to mental ill-health on the way.

I am grateful to Tom Clark for the many years of joint thinking throughout the course of this longitudinal research project. Further, I appreciate the feedback from Holly Henderson and Simon McGrath on earlier versions of this paper, as well as the suggestions from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Red brick universities’ are UK higher education institutions established in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, that tend to be research-intensive in focus and selective in their student intake.

2. Eligibility for a tuition fee waiver (n=18) was dependent on both family income and the Index of Multiple Deprivation ranking of their home or parental postcode. Such financial support was provided to the first three cohorts after the change in the tuition fee system in 2012 and enabled comparisons in experience between those students who received a non-repayable grant or bursary and their higher income counterparts.

3. This study gained ethical approval from the host institution’s ethics co-ordinator at the sociology department on the 31^st of January, 2014.

4. In the UK Honours degree classification system a First-Class Honours (1st) is the highest classification that can be achieved, given to those who reach 70% and above; an Upper Second-Class Honours (2.1) is the higher of two levels of second class degrees, given to those who achieve between 60 and 69% (BBC 2018).

5. Additional two students declined to be interviewed, but kindly provided a brief outline of their next steps since graduation. The figures in brackets in the table represent these two students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Hordósy

Rita Hordósy is a Nottingham Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests revolve around social justice issues in education and post-compulsory education trajectories, with her current work focusing on the research/teaching nexus compared across European universities.