Dian Reay Summary

The article of Dian Reay focuses on the aspect of discrimination in the higher education sector due to the racial, gender and class inequality that preoccupies the society. The writer aims, through interviews of various categories of students; from middle class or working class backgrounds, to evaluate what influenced their decisions concerning higher education. What she discovered through her research was that working class experiences differ from those of “their more privileged middle-class counterparts” (pg 855). It’s suggested that the decisions of these people reflecting the society may be consciously or even unconsciously influenced from their background, their social status and their ethnicity. Although, throughout time there have been noted significant improvements in education opening up …show more content…
Instead, it’s evident through the article that things have not changed and there is a stable pattern of “persistent overrepresentation of middle-class students” (pg 856). There was a larger proportion of student from the first two classes rather the bottom ones. From the study, it was found out that some of the reasons for such unequal participation in higher education lies in the “geographical constraints” (pg861). While most of the middle-class students had access to universities far away from home, working, class children had to think of transportation costs which restricted the amount of choices they had for universities. Other issues included, fitting in as working class students stressed out that they won’t fit in and they preferred to attend a lower standard university where they felt safe, being surrounded from people like them, rather than the established old universities filled with higher class children. Additionally the hours that the working class population had to work while attending university made it impossible for those students to achieve good grades that would help them get into good