Educational Opportunity After Admission: Capital, Capability, and Unequal Student Trajectories in Higher Education
Keywords:
widening participation, higher education equity, capability approach, cultural capital, social class, first-generation students, belonging, continuation, degree attainmentAbstract
Expansion of university entry has not removed differences in continuation, degree attainment, belonging, access to support, or progression after graduation. The differences arise at several points in the student journey rather than at admission alone. This study examines widening participation through Bourdieu's concepts of economic, cultural, and social capital, habitus, and field together with Sen's capability approach. Four concrete processes recur across these studies: unequal access to navigational knowledge; unequal time and financial capacity for participation; unequal access to supportive academic relationships; and unequal institutional recognition of the knowledge, behaviour, and experience students bring to university. These processes can accumulate from application through transition, assessment, continuation, degree completion, and graduate progression. Bourdieu explains why particular resources and dispositions acquire educational value, while Sen explains why formally identical provision does not create identical practical opportunity. Widening participation is therefore better judged by whether students can use admissions, teaching, assessment, support, placements, and careers provision to achieve valued educational outcomes. The resulting institutional priorities are specific: make academic conventions explicit, embed essential academic development in teaching, reduce avoidable time and cost barriers, build dependable staff--student contact, examine differential outcomes at programme level, and extend equity work into postgraduate and employment progression.
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