This article explores some of the issues surrounding student retention at two contrasting universities in Scotland. It is based on a relatively small-scale quantitative survey of students who withdrew or continued, in order that direct comparisons may be made between the two groups. This comparison allows analysis of the constraints and opportunities that face all young people during their time in higher education, and the circumstances under which students decide to withdraw. This shows widespread and similar ®nancial dif®culties amongst students who continue and those who withdraw, suggesting that it is more useful to look at the points at which similar pressures seem bearable for one student but not for another. The research indicates that important factors in the decision to withdraw include: poor choice of course; limited social support networks; and lack of`®t' between student and institution. While there is macro-level evidence of a class gradient in withdrawal rates, the evidence unpacks more fully the reasons why students from a range of socio-economic backgrounds decide to leave university early.
This paper adds to a growing literature on the impacts of the growth in student numbers in the UK, by focusing explicitly on their spatial residential patterns and impacts on labour markets in cities. It shows that students are typically highly residentially concentrated and statistically the population of students shows a high degree of segregation from nonstudents. Turnover within student neighbourhoods is argued to be sufficiently high to cause significant neighbourhood and community disruption in many cities. Students are also shown to have very distinct labour-market characteristics, being highly concentrated within particular sectors and types of occupation. Here too they have the potential for wider impacts, including displacement effects in relation to other local young people from entry-level jobs and increasing the flexibilisation of working practices. Students are also distinctive in apparently being able to find work if they wish to, although the evidence suggests that this is probably marginally easier in more buoyant labour markets. There is much unexplained variation between cities, though, which suggests the need for more detailed local work.
This paper offers an interpretation of how housing markets work which complements more traditional economic approaches. Building on a wider movement within cultural economy and economic sociology, it considers how (housing) markets are variously performed in the power-filled negotiations of buyers, sellers and market professionals. This is part of a larger undertaking, but here the focus is particularly on the role of legal, financial and information intermediaries in shaping local cultures of property exchange. This is a social rather than economic analysis of housing markets; it is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study. It is designed to shed light on how markets are made, though it might, in the end, change the way they are modelled.
Across the public sector there is concern that service uptake is inequitably distributed by socioeconomic circumstances and that public provision exacerbates the existence of inequalities either because services are not allocated by need or because of differential patterns of uptake between the most and least affluent groups. A concept that offers potential to understand access and utilization is 'candidacy' which has been used to explain access to, and utilization of, healthcare. The concept suggests that an individual's identification of his or her 'candidacy' for health services is structurally, culturally, organizationally and professionally constructed, and helps to explain why those in deprived circumstances make less use of services than the more affluent. In this article we assess the fit of candidacy to other public services using a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of three case studies literatures relating to: domestic abuse, higher education and environmental services. We find high levels of congruence between 'candidacy' and the sampled literatures on access/ utilization of services. We find, however, that the concept needs to be refined. In particular, we distinguish between micro, meso and macro factors that play into the identification, sustaining and resolution of candidacy, and demonstrate the plural nature of candidacies. We argue that this refined model of candidacy should be tested empirically beyond and within health. More specifically, in the current economic context, we suggest that it becomes imperative to better understand how access to public services is influenced by multiple factors including changing discourses of deservedness and fairness, and by stringent reductions in the public purse. levels of service uptake are inequitably distributed by socio-economic circumstances -the 'sharp elbowed middle classes' (or at least the relatively more advantaged) appear able to benefit disproportionately from provision across a range of public services including health, education, housing, leisure and cultural services (Le Grand 1982;Gal 1998). Indeed, across a range of services there is evidence that universal public provision, which often paradoxically operates with explicit goals to reduce inequalities, can exacerbate the existence and experience of such inequalities through a range of implicit mechanisms that advantage the most privileged. These mechanisms include those associated with both supply and demand factors.Supply factors include the extent to which services are sufficiently resourced to target need, the degree to which systems work to overcome barriers of accessibility and the ways in which individual workers practice inclusiveness (Meier and Stewart 1991;Gal 1998;Rummery and Glendinning 2000;Priestley et al. 2010). On the demand side, explanations focus on the different perceived relevance of services and differential capacity of the wealthiest and poorest groups in society to make the best use of services. This in turn can lead to a stigmatizing discourse about those who do not eng...
This article explores the experiences of widening access students at two prestigious Universities in Scotland. It is based on interview data collected from a small sample of young and mature students who had all attended a widening access course prior to coming to University. The analysis centres on the students' construction of themselves as 'day students', who live at home and combine studying with commitments to family or to paid employment. While they see being day students as a pragmatic response to their financial and material circumstances, it is argued that this disadvantages the students within the University system both through their limited ability to participate in the wider social aspects of student life and through their exclusion from networks through which important information circulates.
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