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Access to Higherr Education

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Historically, working class groups have been excluded from participating in higher education. For the last couple of decades, there have been noticeable changes towards a more inclusive system of higher education, but statistics show that the participation of working - class in higher education remains persistently low. Can higher education be seen as unattractive for the working class, or are the fees charged by institutions used as a tool to exclude students from working-class backgrounds? This essay examines issues related to access to higher education by students from different social classes, the costs involved and the value of education to people coming from various backgrounds. Higher education has always been, by definition, not open to all and non-compulsory. As Archer (2003) points out, the fact has led to higher education having a particular potential of reinforcing inequalities and the university system long playing a key role in the reproduction of social-class inequalities. In the boundaries of educational research, issues of class have been mostly addressed to the compulsory schooling context, leaving non-compulsory higher education aboard. There has always been a common trend that working-class children tend to achieve much lower rates of attainment and are less likely to continue on to post - compulsory education. As noted by Archer (2003), Bates and Riseborough (1993) have framed out how young people from different social classes do not attend the same

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