Prospective First-Generation Students: Navigating the Pathway to Higher Education

• In Event: 14.022 - Exploring the Lived Experience of College Access and Readiness Through Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

While access to higher education remains a pertinent issue in Australia, the first generation entrant to university has been largely overlooked within the agenda to ‘widen participation’. For those who possess no parental experience of higher education, the pathway to university can encompass many challenges in comparison to those who benefit from intergenerational knowledge of this field as well as access to the dominant forms of cultural and social resources that are given value and rewarded. This study employs Arjun Appadurai’s theory of the ‘capacity to aspire’, and Bourdieu’s concepts of social capital, cultural capital, habitus and field as theoretical tools to examine the aspirations of prospective first generation students, and how they navigate the pathway to higher education.

Authors

• Sally Patfield, The University of Newcastle

• Jennifer M. Gore, The University of Newcastle

• Leanne Fray, The University of Newcastle

• Adam Lloyd, The University of Newcastle