Prelims

Half Title Page

Selling Our Youth

Series Title Page

Great Debates in Higher Education is a series of short, accessible books addressing key challenges to and issues in Higher Education, on a national and international level. These books are research informed but debate driven. They are intended to be relevant to a broad spectrum of researchers, students and administrators in higher education, and are designed to help us unpick and assess the state of higher education systems, policies, and social and economic impacts.

Title Page

Selling Our Youth

Graduate Stories of Class, Gender and Work in Challenging Times

By

Harriet Bradley

University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Richard Waller

University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

And

Laura Bentley

University of Birmingham, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Copyright © 2022 Harriet Bradley, Richard Waller and Laura Bentley.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-239-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-236-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-238-7 (Epub)

About the Authors

Harriet Bradley is Professor Emerita at Bristol and West of England Universities and Fellow of the Academy of Social Science. Her many publications include Fractured Identities, Gender and Power in the Workplace and Men's Work, Women's Work. She has written and researched widely on inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity. The Paired Peers project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is the latest of many research projects she has headed. The first book jointly authored by the project team, Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility, was awarded a prize by the Society for Education Studies.

Richard Waller is Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he has worked since 1995. Richard's research explores the intersection of education, social class and identity, and is driven by a social justice agenda. In addition to the Paired Peers project upon which many of his key publications are based, Richard has also recently completed projects on combatting gender-based violence in universities, and a retrospective analysis of the Aim Higher widening participation initiative of the early 2000s. He is currently researching the experiences and motivations of working-class young men in higher education.

Laura Bentley is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. She is the principal investigator for the project Still Jenny from the Block? Working-class women, higher education and social mobility in the COVID context. Previously, Laura has worked on the Paired Peers project and the Revisiting the Needs of Sutton Coldfield: Change and Future Requirements project. She is a co-convenor of the British Sociological Association's Social Class Study Group and hosts the Working-class Women's Writing Retreat for academics and students.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust for its funding of the Paired Peers project, especially its faith in us providing the second tranche for the follow-up study. We also want to acknowledge the other members of the team who worked with us to generate the data used in this book: Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Tony Hoare, Nicola Ingram, Jessie Abrahams, Vanda Papafilippou, Jody Mellor, Phoebe Beedell and Mike Ward. We are very grateful to Bristol University and the University of the West of England for assisting with this research.

Special thanks are due to Jessie Abrahams for conducting the survey reported on in Chapter 7 and sharing its data.

Harriet Bradley would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for its funding for the Winners and Losers project, data from which are also referred to in the book: the team for this project also included Steve Fenton, Jackie West, Will Guy and Ranji Devadason.

We thank our families for their forbearance and support while we were writing this book: (especially Steve Gillen, Caroline Laybourn, Charlie Waller, Eddie Waller, Daniel Round, Ben Copley and Lisa Copley).

Finally, we owe a massive debt to the fantastic young adults who gave their time and thoughts to be interviewed for our projects. Thank you for giving us permission to tell your stories and use quotations from the interviews. We wish you all the very best for your lives in these challenging times.