Introduction: Setting the scene

As Waller et al. (2014: 701) noted, in the UK and beyond ‘a university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds’, and as a way of reproducing social advantage for the wealthy. The number of young people from the highest socio-economic groups entering university in the UK has effectively been at saturation point for several decades since the Robbins Report (CHE, 1963) and subsequent growth of higher education (HE) from the late 1960s onwards. As a consequence, the expansion in youth participation rates from around 15 per cent in the mid-1980s (Chowdry et al., 2010) to something like three times that currently (Department for Business, Information and Skills [BIS] 2015) has been achieved by broadening the social base of the undergraduate population in terms of both social class and ethnic diversity. That said, this ‘broadening’ still leaves significant inequalities (as this edited collection outlines), and also much of it can be accounted for by the changing class composition of the UK in the last 50 or more years.