The Idea of Education - 2008 Conference Programme Session 2

Session 2: Students in Higher Education
Chair: Philippa Hall

‘It’ll look good on your personal statement’: Self-marketing amongst University Applicants in the UK
Lucie Shuker
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The neo-liberal education reforms of the 1980s (continuing largely unchallenged by New Labour) have served, in key respects, to establish the culture of markets and competition at the heart of British education. These reforms have not only affected education at the organisational level but simultaneously demand a transformation of the individual (Bernstein 1999, Beck 1999, Ball, 2003). Survival in the market requires individuals to develop an outwardly responsive identity, a process described by Beck (ibid) as an assault on inwardness. This paper is concerned with the ways in which market culture within education discursively positions pupils as enterprising subjects in seeking to prepare them for work in risk society.
It draws on doctoral research-in-progress that investigates the process of self-marketing that 16-19 year olds undertake in the process of applying for positions at HE. A multi-case study design was developed and used through which data from interviews, observations, focus groups and documents were analysed to consider the approaches and orientations of 38 students in three diverse educational institutions. Much of the collected data related to the process of students’ writing a personal statement for the Universities and Colleges Admission System (UCAS), as an example of ‘self-marketing’.
Among the emerging findings are initial suggestions that internal tensions exist between the government’s target to widen access to HE and cultures of competition at moments of transition, notably the use of social and cultural capital as a means of social closure by the middle classes. Discourses of ‘enrichment’ and ‘citizenship’ are being undermined, in some instances, by instrumental approaches to voluntary work and extra-curricular activity, which are increasingly posited as ‘useful’ in competition. At these moments of transition and competition, it could be argued that HE plays the role of the consumer as students attempt to position themselves as attractive commodities toward the market.

PhD and Career – Is a Doctoral Degree Worth It?
Sonja Engelage & Andreas Hadjar
Department of Sociology of Education, University of Berne, Switzerland

In the 1980s during the educational expansion, a debate arose in many European countries concerning the rising number of academics and oversaturation of the academic labour market. Whether or not the occupational success of PhD graduates did actually decrease will be analysed on the basis of the Swiss Graduate Study (1983-2001) also regarding gender and discipline differences. Occupational success includes monetary benefits (income) and protection against unemployment as well as subjective success variables namely subjective perceived adequacy of educational qualification and occupation.
According to human capital theory (Becker 1964) PhD graduates - compared to people with a primary university degree – have a higher chance to get adequate jobs, earn more money and have a smaller risk to get unemployed. Regarding signalling theory (Weiss 1995) two different directions of argumentation will be explored: Either a devaluation of the PhD degree may be expected as the supply of people with higher educational degrees rises on the labour market. The group of higher educated people become more and more heterogeneous regarding social origin because of the opening of higher education institutions. Or it may be expected that the PhD degree gains importance, because only highest degrees ensure high educational returns and protect against status descent. The doctoral degree still guarantees a good position in the ‘labour queue’ (Thurow 1975).Considering the theory of statistical discrimination we expect female PhD graduates to gain less benefit from their degree than their male colleagues.
By means of descriptive and multivariate methods of data analysis (OLS regression, logit models), differences in educational returns between people with a primary university degree and a doctoral degree will be analysed in temporal and a gender perspective.
Results show that a doctoral degree still gives protection against unemployment as well as it results in higher income and higher adequacy of the employment. A doctoral degree is still more profitable for men than for women.

Choice of Field of Study in Switzerland
Frank Schubert & Michael Beck
University of Bern, Department of Sociology of Education, Switzerland

Both the decision to attend any higher education institution and aspirations for higher education certificates are highly influenced by social origin, but social inequality also plays a major role within educational institutions. The aim of our paper is therefore to investigate the choice of field of study. Until now this research question has been rarely studied – and not at all for Switzerland. Following the theoretical framework of Breen and Goldthorpe (1997), we use a structural-individualistic action model to describe this decision process based on social origin, gender and migration background. Further, we include additional information on length of study, expected subject-specific income schemes, expected average prestige scores and expected unemployment risks at the time of the decision to model relevant job outcome influences. We therefore assume a rational decision process underlying the choice of field of study. Our hypothesis is, that status maintenance is one of the key factors in the decision making process regarding choice of field of study (cf. van de Werfhorst et al., 2001 for the Netherlands). Students originating from higher strata choose more often fields of studies that lead to traditionally high prestigious jobs (e.g. medicine and law) than students from lower strata. We also investigate the role of expected labour market outcomes on the decision process. In our empirical analysis we use data from the biennial Swiss Student Survey employing Multinominal Logistic Regressions. Logit results are presented using easy-to-read graphs and figures. Preliminary results confirm our hypothesis, but also raise further interesting questions on the choice of field of study, upward mobility and other influences on the decision process.