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Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between social background, choice of university programme and academic culture among Danish university students. Statistically and sociologically, university students are often treated as a homogeneous group, but the ever-increasing number of students in higher education demands a closer examination of the hidden heterogeneity in the students’ social origin and educational strategies. Using a mixed-method approach (register data and ethnographic observations and interviews) the paper focuses on the students’ class origins and on different cultural practices in three Danish university programmes. It is shown that the Danish university field is characterized by a significant variation in social selectivity from programme to programme, and it is argued that these different social profiles correspond with distinctively different cultural practices in the programmes. Correspondingly, the students have distinctively different strategies towards education and future work life.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments.
Notes
1. In this paper, attention is given to the dominant practice in each programme.
2. The formula for the disparity ratios used is (F22/ F2) / (F11/ F1), where F22 is the number of university students with academic parents (a university degree), F2 is the number of academic parents in the parent generation (45–69 years of age), F11 is the number of university students with unskilled parents (primary and lower secondary education), and F1 is the number of unskilled parents in the parent generation (45–69 years of age).
3. The variables available in the register data suggest using simple CA instead of the normally preferred multiple CA, which is suitable in richer survey datasets.
4. The CA presented here has been tested for stability (Greenacre Citation1993) and the inertia and eigenvalues of the axis are within the threshold values suggested by Lebart, Morineau, and Warwick (Citation1984).
5. Problems arise from the fact that many of these studies lack a control group (they have only interviewed working-class students).
6. This is most probably an effect of the Danish welfare state, of the relative lack of traditional class identity in the Danish Population (compared with England, for example), of the absence of tuition fees in the Danish education system, and of universal student grants.
7. An important delimitation in this study is that I have not interviewed teachers or observed examinations, nor do I have access to the students’ university grades.