Mature students’ experiences of undertaking higher education in English vocational institutions: employability and academic capital

The bachelor’s degree in college systems: history, evidence and argument from England

“…Qualitative studies about higher education in the further education sector are mainly addressed to aspects of teaching and learning, including student and staff engagement (Jones, 2006a(Jones, , 2006b. How the bachelor's degree is experienced in colleges is little researched (Henderson, 2020), although there is a growing literature on the experience of students moving from sub-bachelor qualifications to the bachelor's level (Greenbank, 2007;Winter and Dismore, 2010;Pike and Harrison, 2011;Morgan, 2013;Lavender, 2020;Welsh, 2020). Less common again are empirical studies which make direct comparisons with the bachelor's degree offered at universities, particularly when considered from the student perspective.…”

Renewing and Revitalising the Social Mission of Higher Education

“…Different capital theories of employability have gained prominence in HE globally in the form of both capital subcomponents and overarching concepts, including academic capital(Hu & Cairns 2017;Lavender 2020), personal capital(Brown, Hesketh & Williams 2003;Lehmann 2019), ethnic capital(Abrahamsen & Drange 2015;Shah, Dwyer & Modood 2010;Sin 2016), identity capital(Côté 2005;Naseem 2019), mobility capital(Hu & Cairns 2017;Wiers- Jenssen 2011), career capital (D'Amico et al 2019Reichenberger & Raymond 2021), graduate capital(Tomlinson 2017;Wijayanama, Ranjani & Mohan, 2021) and employability capital(Caballero, Álvarez-González & López-Miguens 2020;Nghia, Giang & Quyen 2019).Employability researchers have turned to the Bourdieusian multi-faceted conceptualisation of embodied, objectified and institutionalised cultural capital and related concepts (not only social capital, but also symbolic capital, linguistic capital and educational capital or academic capital) to gain a more nuanced understanding of both employer expectations and graduate aspirations, particularly among minority groups, such as mature students and international graduates. Scholarship covers students at a further education college and the Open University in the UK(Lavender 2020;Pegg & Carr 2010), students from China and Malaysia recently graduated from Australia and the UK(Blackmore, Gribble & Rahimi 2017;Sin 2016) and employer practices of 'cultural matching' in advanced manufacturing companies in the US and financial services firms in Australia(Hora 2020;Parry & Jackling 2015). Bourdieusian theory clarifies relationships between different forms of capital, but offers limited insight into contemporary sociocultural influences on employment outcomes, notably for different ethnic groups, but also for similar groups experiencing different issues, hence the use of ethnic capital and personal capital to explain counterintuitive outcomes.…”