Triple disadvantage: when othered students, study an othered course at an othered university – working-class, mature students’ discursive accounts of life on (and beyond) a two-year undergraduate Law degree

A plethora of research has provided insight into how non-traditional (including working-class and/or mature) students experience three-year undergraduate degrees at public sector universities. This shows that for these students university is experienced differently to traditional students, with non-traditional students feeling relatively disadvantaged. Little is known, though, about how working-class, mature students experience a two-year undergraduate degree at private HEIs. Furthermore, research has failed to address how working-class, mature students experience their two-year undergraduate Law degree and how they discursively construct their student experience. This thesis reports on (semi-longitudinal) research conducted over two phases at one ‘private’ Law school in the south of England. Phase one constituted an 18-month period (between February 2014 to August 2015) of fieldwork. Follow-up interviews took place in May 2019 (phase two). The study comprised a range of qualitative methods: semi-structured interviews of Law students and Law tutors, focus group discussions, discourse analysis of various policy texts, and informal observations of the practices at the Law school; an analysis of which attempts to provide some insight into this under-researched area. The Foucauldian inspired analysis suggests that working-class, mature students in this study constructed their student experience via discourses connected to ‘intensity’, ‘student as consumer/investor/partner’, and ‘employability’ all of which were hegemonic, complex and shifting. The analysis of the data also suggests that the discourses worked to discursively (re)position the students as more or less powerful at different moments and in different contexts. These temporary (re)positionings of powerlessness had an impact on subjectivities to the extent of becoming further disadvantaged. The significance of this is that the nature of a two-year undergraduate Law degree and/or studying at a private HEI was found to exaggerate disadvantage. In particular, when constructing 'the student experience', the working-class, mature students variously drew upon, resisted and negotiated intensity, consumer, investor, partner and employability discourses - all of which impacted upon discursive (re)positionings and subjectivities. This study makes an original contribution to knowledge about working-class, mature students’ experiences of disadvantage within HE. It exposes that this disadvantage is further intensified when pursuing an (Othered) fast-track undergraduate degree at an (Othered) private HEI. Consequently, when non-traditional students on ‘those courses’, at ‘those places’, are subjected to intensity, consumer, investor, partner, and employability discourses they are disproportionally and
further positioned as powerless; amounting to triple disadvantage.