Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff…

This paper considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a test that has disrupted the flow of a particular type of social and physical mobility. It takes pathways embarked upon by students from Asian countries to "prestigious" anglophone universities as its focal point of analysis, considering how the residential, consecratory experience of…

Inclusion is seen as an ethical obligation, grounded in notions of equity and social justice for all groups and at all stages of education, with higher education (HE) representing a distinctive space where the inclusion agenda is becoming more influential. However, inclusion is also increasingly recognised as an ambiguous concept that might have…

We explore how the influx of foreign funding into the higher education sectors of the United States and United Kingdom has raised the challenge of "reputation laundering"--when foreign donors and individuals use donations to prestigious universities to boost their international public image and offset negative images or reported…

In this paper, we argue that the power structure that lies within the UK elite universities dictates a division of labour through which the inflows of overseas academics into the UK academic labour markets are skewed towards these elite academic institutions where they are employed primarily in research-only posts. These posts, are less valued and…

The past two decades have seen the idea of internationalization move into the mainstream of higher education policy and practice, on a global scale. In countries like the US and UK however, higher education is widely perceived as a hierarchical field, where high- and low-status universities are differentiated from one another: serving different…

Despite substantial prior research on higher education choice, top universities in the UK continue to stand accused of favouring socio-economically advantaged students, to the detriment of those from poorer backgrounds. The objectives of this study are to test whether students with the same or equivalent entry scores are more or less likely to…

In this article, Margaret Lamb begins by introducing readers to her interpretation of "honours" and "honours education" and describing the experiences that have formed her perspectives on the topics she discusses. In the remainder of the article, she (1) places some characteristics of Oxford undergraduate education in a wider…