I am starting my notes on this early on in the reading coming, as it is very soon after reading Heffernan (2022) and the thoughts that inspired in me. The introduction of this article focuses on discussing the concept of social mobility, which has led me to consider the difference between social mobility and quality of life. My work seeks to understand the transformational nature of HE for individuals, particularly those who enter HE through less-traditional routes. However, although I have been searching for articles that talk about social mobility, I am wondering more and more how this is related to quality of life and, indeed, if it is at all.
I think I may need to read more into what it is about deprivation that decreases quality of life, particularly when it is not abject poverty. Obviously, everyone needs enough money to eat healthily and feel secure, but beyond this, could it be that the associated lack of self-worth, sense of agency and all the other mindset-related issues that impedes quality of life? If those psychological factors change but not income, do we still see an improvement in quality of life?
So far, this article focuses heavily on the goal of degree apprenticeships allowing more people to enter higher status, higher paid professions. However, this suggests that policy-makers have decided themselves that this should be the goal based on the rather reductionist idea that more money will always mean better lives. The authors demonstrate that we are beginning to see saturation within the high-status, highly paid job-market and that, as a result, fewer graduates are able to work within these sectors. Interestingly, they also refer to the need for applicants to have the capital required to be successful applicants to these roles - something that is far easier for those from more advantaged backgrounds and which refers to the Bourdieusian concept of fit.
I would argue that this emphasis on the goal being access to higher status, higher paid work may actually miss the point of higher education. Heffernan (2022) describes how the doxa (a term used by Bourdieu) of higher education has changed over time from being an environment for broadening minds to one focused far more heavily on its contribution to the economy. My sense is that my thoughts on this are in the early stages of forming into something more concrete but that my argument is that some of the well-established ill-effects of poverty (at least above a certain level of poverty!) may well be mitigated simply through the deschooling impact of good higher education. Smith et al. begin to allude to this when they describe social mobility as being:
"more akin to a consideration of upward education mobility where by offspring of non university-educated parents seek higher education" (p. 490)
but they take this exploration no further than this.
(I also think I need a better term than 'quality of life' to describe this because what I am discussing is more about a sense of feeling empowered within one's life.)
When discussing the issue of saturation, Smith et al. argue that some of the responsibility must lie with employers in terms of the importance they attach to HE qualifications. However, again this speaks to the issue of the perceived value of a degree vs. what that degree symobolises. When done well, I would argue that HE is about far more than simply a higher qualification. It is about what one learns about oneself and the place one holds in the world that is the true value of a HE qualification.
Another issue this article raises for me is the authors' explanation of the widening participation drive in HE (although they demonstrate that degree apprenticeships are still more likely to be taken up by more advantaged groups than the groups they were initially aimed at). The authors discuss widening participation solely in terms of making higher education more accessible to those from less traditional backgrounds but fails to dig into the issue of what happens to these students once they are enrolled. There is no discussion on the varied and complex needs such students may have and how HE needs to adapt to meet those needs.
The findings of the research suggest that there is wider participation in HDAs when apprentices are recruited to them by employers wanting to upskill existing employees. When employers recruit directly to apprenticeship posts, they still tend to recruit those from groups that traditionally go to university anyway. The authors argue that employers have a role to play in working towards contextual hiring into apprenticeship roles in the same way universities seek to make contextual offers in order to widening participation. However, I argue that this still all speaks to the need for higher education as a whole to rethink its raison d'être and to work towards communicating that raison d'être more effectively. I would argue that the indirect benefit to society of having the kind of empowered, healthier, happier and more productive citizens that should be possible through experiencing the personal transformation that good higher education can facilitate, must surely be far more impactful than the surface-level, direct impact on the economy that the Government (and society) seems to think comes simply from more people having more degrees so they can do higher paid, higher status work. My belief is that the process of deschooling that can be afforded by good higher education should be its true, and overtly communicated, raison d'être and that we should be actively seeking to change society's perception of HE from one of pure 'go to university to learn more things and join the elite' to one of 'go to university in order to learn how to live life better'.
Another finding of the research focused on the financial situation of apprentices and the fact that an HDA represents a route into HE usually unavailable for anyone without the financial means to pursue further learning. This means that higher education can move from being a luxury to a societal norm. However, the article also highlights the issue of working while studying also means apprentices have more pressure to manage their time. I would argue that this is not a true issue given firstly that many (56% according to the latest HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey (Neves et al., 2024)) non-apprenticeship students find they have to work to fund their studies and, in fact, an experience such as this will support apprentices to learn valuable, transferable skills about time-management, self-care and personal resilience that will serve them well in the rest of their lives.
References
Neves, J., Freeman, J., Stephenson, R., Sotiropoulou, P. (2024). Student Academic Experience Survey. York: Advance HE. Available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SAES-2024.pdf (Accessed: 7 March 2025).
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