Educators have been concerned about students' time management skills for decades. Subsequently, scholars have studied approaches for better time management to intervene and help students. Prior research has described organizing, scheduling, and completing tasks to meet time constraints. Although insightful for understanding key mechanisms at the…

Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff…

With the goal of improving efforts and initiatives to promote college completion, this book offers an engaging, in-depth analysis of the cultural journeys of rural, poor and working-class college students. By examining select student stories through the lens of cultural flexibility, cultural integration, and cultural capital and wealth, the author…

Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of…

In the last few decades, universities in India have witnessed the joining of a record number of students from marginalized communities and oftentimes struggle. This expansion of access has brought about changes within classrooms and college campuses, sometimes giving rise to contention and causing numerous conflicts as well. Centered around my…

This article theorises the hidden injuries of undocumented immigration statues. Through ten years of longitudinal ethnographic research (2012-2022), the author centres the experiences of two undocumented Latina youth as they navigate K-12 to higher education and discusses how immigration status, racialisation, and class immobility are intertwined.…

In a context of universalization of Higher Education (HE) and fragmentation of educational trajectories, consolidating a process of educational and social mobility implies, for many students with non-traditional backgrounds, important identity conflicts. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with non-traditional working-class students enrolled in an…

Internships have been widely recognized as an effective channel for enhancing the employability of higher education (HE) students. Accordingly, any inequality in internship opportunities may lead to inequality in students' employability and future social positioning. Using Bourdieu's three forms of capital, this study explores how students'…

This qualitative study examines meritocratic beliefs among disadvantaged students in elite universities in China. Through interviews with twenty-six working-class and lower-middle-class students, the research documents a temporal shift from initial optimism to disillusionment. The analysis integrates Willis's cultural production theory with…

First-generation students often feel alone on college campuses. These students can find themselves excluded from organizations, traditions, and spaces that require financial, social, and cultural capital they may not have. In my Sociology of Work course, I use a family work history project to center and validate their experiences. Using census…

In the summer of 1978, at Church Teachers' College in Mandeville, Jamaica, a class of advanced students participating in the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) wrote, cast, rehearsed, and performed a play that satirized several major institutions--the family, the church, and the business sector--as well as class and gender…

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

The uniformly positive view of social mobility in the United Kingdom overlooks the difficulties working-class young people have in reconciling a working-class background with the middle-class environments of the university and the professional labour market. But even more hidden are the subtle processes of exclusion and exclusivity that permeate…

This dissertation examines how the recent rise in college going for young people from low-income families in the United States has shaped processes that reproduce poverty. Drawing on 2,400 hours of ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 25 months with eight young Black men in New Orleans, the study provides an in-depth look at the experience of…

Despite efforts to foster a more equitable gender representation, Australia's higher education sector and workforce continue to be highly segregated. This article focusses on the gendered experiences of first-in-family (FIF) students--many who are from low-socioeconomic communities--transitioning to Australian universities. In terms of the…