| dc.description.abstract | Abstract By many actors in the Higher Education system, social mobility has been considered a solved problem on account of the massification of attendance and the huge increase in disadvantaged student participation. However, the rhetoric that paints this debate in a positive light glosses over the numerous and ever increasing barriers that disadvantaged students continue to face. These barriers, which in this study are split up into cultural and financial, can be addressed at three distinct stages of the Higher Education narrative: Access, Retention and Employment. Having collated an abundant amount of varied evidence from existing studies that attests to these barriers to social mobility, and having discovered a number of interesting themes that appear to run throughout. I have set these themes against relevant, but underused psychosocial and philosophical theory, as well as against the findings from my own data collection, in order to chart the narrative of barriers to social mobility from prior-to undergraduate application, right the way through to graduate employment. I find that deeply embedded cultural dissimilarity arises between disadvantaged students and elite environments on account of the former’s lack of ‘embodied capital’, which results in a ‘cultural discordance’ typically associated with feelings of ‘non-belonging’ and ‘alienation’. These feelings can coordinate student agency, often to the end of making irrational decisions. They can also lead to disengagement, and oftentimes the likelihood of dropping out, which is detrimental to social mobility. Widening Access and Retention schemes must therefore be cognizant of the most effective ways to facilitate a sense ‘belonging’ in disadvantaged students, which I find are, but not at all limited to: -‘demystifying’ the notion of the University Experience through outreach programmes before Widening Access students are undergraduates in order to ‘cultivate familiarity’ -teaching disadvantaged students ‘reflexive engagement’ as a means of adapting to differentiated complexities of societal, economic and political uncertainty -championing those opportunities that allow for disadvantaged students to ‘shift habitus’ as a means of developing the necessary cultural capital needed to thrive in elite environments, particularly elite recruiting processes, instead of being intimidated by them. In a series of semi-structured interviews with four disadvantaged undergraduates and three disadvantaged drop-outs, I draw comparisons between and deviations from the existing literature and theory in order to shed some new light on the subtle gaps that are still left untouched in the debate, those namely being, for example: -the lack of attention paid to the problem of ‘cultural matching’ in elite hiring procedures -whether disadvantaged students pandering to ‘cultural fit’ is an ethical way to acquire embodied capital as means of becoming socially mobile and how, even in the wrath of such continuous criticism; criticism which dispels the credibility of league tables, exposes the discriminative nature of elite University recruitment and which contests that the current hierarchy of institutions induces a Pareto Optimality that is detrimental to social mobility, does the elite manage to autopoietically resist change, and simultaneously, gild its circle of privilege further? | eng |