ABSTRACT

In recent decades, the Australian higher education landscape has achieved significant expansion. Initially aimed at getting more people into university, massification policies have, more recently, focused on widening participation – encouraging a more diverse array of students to ‘choose’ higher education. Paradoxically, this shift has deepened stratification, with new inequalities within and across the academy. However, this stratification is glossed over in widening participation policy and research. In this paper, we challenge this view by examining young people’s capacities to ‘choose’ university using the heuristic of ‘embedded choosers’ and ‘contingent choosers.’ Our analysis of two school-based case studies highlights the early stratification of students’ post-school choices, conceptualised as a continuum from an absence of choice to a wide array of global choice. We argue that rather than focus on gains in overall enrolment, there is a critical need to address the insidious stratification that is subsumed within the widening participation agenda.

摘要

近几十年来，澳大利亚高等教育版图实现了显着扩张。大众化政策最初的目的是让更多的人进入大学，但最近，其重点是扩大参与范围——鼓励更多样化的学生“选择”高等教育。矛盾的是，这种转变加深了分层，内部和外部出现了新的不平等。学院。然而，这种分层在扩大参与政策和研究中被掩盖了。在本文中，我们通过使用“嵌入式选择者”和“偶然选择者”的启发法来检验年轻人“选择”大学的能力，从而挑战了这一观点。我们对两个以学校为基础的案例研究的分析强调了学生毕业后选择的早期分层，将其概念化为从缺乏选择到广泛的全球选择的连续统一体。我们认为，我们迫切需要解决扩大参与议程中隐含的分层现象，而不是关注总体入学率的提高。