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To aspire: a systematic reflection on understanding aspirations in higher education

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Abstract

Aspirations for higher education by people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds are now a focus of government policy in many OECD nations. This is part of a global trend emphasizing the perceived benefits of ‘raising’ aspirations among under-represented groups as a social inclusion strategy to widen university participation, but also ultimately as a strategy to increase national competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. Yet despite its importance, aspiration tends to carry simplistic meanings in much higher education policy and practice. This paper attempts to craft a more nuanced account of the term, informed by four concept-clusters derived from sociological and philosophical literatures and research, and with a more mutual relation of public and private interests. It complements this ‘intellectual craftsmanship’ or ‘systematic reflection’ (Mills in The sociological imagination, 1959) with data drawn from a future-focused survey of secondary school students from low and low-mid socioeconomic status backgrounds in regional Australia. Results from the survey provide illustrations that help expand understandings of student aspirations for higher education, from a group presumed to be deficit in aspirations.

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Notes

  1. Student comments are reproduced here verbatim to preserve the authenticity of their voices.

  2. Data were only available for 10 of the 14 schools in the survey.

  3. The prestige scale used is Australian Socioeconomic Index 2006 (AUSIE06), itself based developed by McMillian et al. (2009) on the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO). The scale ranks the perceived status of a broad range of occupations, such as medical doctor (score of 100), social worker (80), dental technician (59) and cleaner (20). A higher score indicates that an occupation has higher prestige. For further detail see http://www.acer.edu.au/ausei06.

  4. Hexford University is a pseudonym.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Greg Stratton who contributed to an earlier version of this paper presented at The Australian Sociological Association (TASA). We also thank other members of the research team who contributed to the research reported in this paper (Piper Rodd, Tim Sealey and Teresa Moore), and the staff and students of the schools that participated in the survey. Special thanks for the support of The Warrnambool Collective.

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Gale, T., Parker, S. To aspire: a systematic reflection on understanding aspirations in higher education. Aust. Educ. Res. 42, 139–153 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-014-0165-9

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