Promoting university to the parents of students -  Normative youth transitions and intensification of  ‘ideal’ parenting into HE

Cullen, Fin; Johnston, Craig

Abstract

This paper draws on recent marketing moves within the English universities to increasingly promote Higher Education (HE) to the parents of students. Changes to the HE landscapes in England – including the massification and commodification of the sector and the significant financial contribution of family in assisting students - has led to UCAS (the university’s shared admission portal) hosting a dedicated page for parents. Many universities also host webpages and resources aimed at the parents of HE, which includes dedicated advice and guidance for parents, for example. In this paper, we are particularly interested in how the parents of prospective students and their offspring are discursively positioned and reproduced, and how dedicated marketing imagines the broader role of universities in England.
A rising body of scholarship has traced the role of the university in supporting students on their progression to a perceived ‘future’ adulthood (Archer et al, 2007; Jones, 2009). Other work has noted how HE policies continue to promote normative generational and classed biographies that reproduce barriers towards non-traditional learners, mature students and students with caring responsibilities (Reay, 1998; Reay, 20082; Moreau, 2016). Indeed, Brooks’ notes that within the realm of such policy, contemporary HE students are constructed in several paradoxical and problematic ways - one strand being that of as ‘non-empowered consumers’ or alternatively ‘ vulnerable children’ (Brooks, 2018). This ascribed child-like status is reproduced across university literature and needs to be unpacked in greater detail. The construction of parent and child- frames the parent as agentic and the child as largely dependent on the financial, emotional and wellbeing support of parents. These are the focus of this paper where we explore how parents and children are constructed across institutional and policy texts and the role that this casts for each constituent group. We are particularly focused on the dual discursive construction of the agentic parents of students and the student as passive child within such texts.

Our theoretical interest here emerges out of the intersection of scholarship on youth transitions (Jones, 2009), intensive parenting (Edwards & Alldred, 2000; Gillies, 2005), and the construction of the neoliberal HE policy and its associated literature (Taylor, 2008; Brooks, 2018). Our intention in this paper is to present our preliminary findings of a small-scale discourse analysis of promotion and recruitment materials and resources aimed at the parents of prospective students in supporting their child’s university admission. These findings will also build upon prior work which examines the role of parents in their children’s university choice (Reay, 1998; Ball, Reay & David, 2002; Haywood, & Scullion, 2018; Al‐Yousef, 2009). While dedicated resources aimed at the parents of non-traditional students may be seen as a welcome step for access and participation, we are interested in how these imagine particular generational subjectivities, and re/constitute normative class based biographic trajectories and the shifting positions of the contemporary and future ‘ideal’ HE student.

References
•Al‐Yousef, H. (2009). ‘They know nothing about university–neither of them went’: the effect of parents’ level of education on their involvement in their daughters’ higher education choices. Compare, 39(6), 783-798.
•Archer, L., Hollingworth, S., & Halsall, A. (2007). University's not for Me—I'm a Nike Person': Urban, Working-Class Young People's Negotiations of Style', Identity and Educational Engagement. Sociology, 41(2), 219-237.
•Ball, S. J., Reay, D., & David, M. (2002). 'Ethnic Choosing': Minority ethnic students, social class and higher education choice. Race ethnicity and education, 5(4), 333-357.
•Brooks, R. (2018). The construction of higher education students in English policy documents. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(6), 745-761.
•David, M. E., Ball, S. J., Davies, J., & Reay, D. (2003). Gender issues in parental involvement in student choices of higher education. Gender and Education, 15(1), 21-36.
•Edwards, R. and Alldred, P., 2000. A typology of parental involvement in education centring on children and young people: Negotiating familialisation, institutionalisation and individualisation. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(3), pp.435-455.
•Gillies, V. (2005). Raising the ‘Meritocracy’ Parenting and the Individualization of Social Class. Sociology, 39(5), 835-853.
•Haywood, H., & Scullion, R. (2018). ‘It’s quite difficult letting them go, isn’t it?’ UK parents’ experiences of their child’s higher education choice process. Studies in Higher Education, 43(12), 2161-2175.
•Jones, G. (2009). Youth (Vol. 17). Polity
•Moreau, M. P. (2016). Regulating the student body/ies: University policies and student parents. British Educational Research Journal, 42(5), 906-925.
•Reay, D. (1998). ’Always knowing’ and ‘never being sure’: familial and institutional habituses and higher education choice. Journal of education policy, 13(4), 519-529.
•Reay, D. (2002). Class, authenticity and the transition to higher education for mature students. The Sociological Review, 50(3), 398-418.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: BERA Conference 2024
• Start Date: Sep 8, 2024
• End Date: Sep 12, 2024
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 3, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13262050