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1103
‘Strangers in Paradise’? Working-class Students
in Elite Universities
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Diane Reay
University of Cambridge
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Gill Crozier
Roehampton University
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John Clayton
University of Sunderland
ABSTRACT
This article draws on case studies of nine working-class students at Southern, an
elite university. 1 It attempts to understand the complexities of identities in flux
through Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field. Bourdieu (1990a) argues that
when an individual encounters an unfamiliar field, habitus is transformed. He also
writes of how the movement of habitus across new, unfamiliar fields results in ‘a
habitus divided against itself’ (Bourdieu, 1999a). Our data suggest more nuanced
understandings in which the challenge of the unfamiliar results in a range of
creative adaptations and multi-faceted responses. They display dispositions of self-
scrutiny and self-improvement – almost ‘a constant fashioning and re-fashioning of
the self’ but one that still retains key valued aspects of a working-class self.
Inevitably, however, there are tensions and ambivalences, and the article explores
these, as well as the very evident gains for working-class students of academic success
in an elite HE institution.
KEY WORDS
elite universities / habitus / working-class students
Sociology
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009, Reprints and permissions:
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 43(6): 1103–1121
DOI: 10.1177/0038038509345700

1104 Sociology Volume 43
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Number 6
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December 2009
Introduction
B
etween 2002 and 2006 the proportion of working-class students in UK
universities declined slightly, despite government pressure to increase their
numbers. The percentage fell between 2005 and 2006 from 28.6 per cent
to 28.2 per cent (Blair, 2006). Over the same period Southern University’s state
school admissions dropped to 57.9 per cent, while its percentage of students
from low-income families fell to 12.4. Since then there has been a further fall
in the proportion of students from low-income families both at UK universities
in general and at Southern in particular (Frean, 2007; Grimston, 2009; Pallis,
2008; Paton, 2007). It is against this background that our ESRC TLRP
research project
2
has been conducted and the focus of this article is on a group
we have called ‘strangers in paradise’, nine working-class students 3 in an elite
English university (although as will become clearer through the course of this
article in a number of ways the working-class students are not strangers nor, for
the most part, would they perceive themselves to be ‘in paradise’).
These nine students, all highly academically successful, present a particular
challenge for commonsense conflations of working class with ‘average’ or ‘low’
ability and indifferent educational attainment (Weis, 1990; Willis, 1977). None
of the parents of the nine students have been to university themselves, although
one father, now retired, has started a business studies course at a new university.