Universities are meant to be free spaces that catalyse critical and scientific thinking, creating conditions for liberty, equality and fraternity. There has always been a connection of sorts between education policy and issues of equality and social justice. Sometimes this is an overt relationship; other times, it is more to do with unintended outcomes of socially unjust policies.

While students may be enrolled in a university or school for the same academic pursuit, their classroom experience will be different, refracted by experiences of caste, class, and gender (Vaid, 2018: 2). Social confidence, language skills and prior training, dependent on one’s social location in an unequal society, matters. These, in turn, plays out when it comes to classroom interaction and ‘presentation of selves’.

Universities are also spaces where students play a significant role as agents of social, cultural, and political development, especially in developing countries like India, where they constitute an important section of the population vocal about socio-political issues.

When one considers these aspects and the obvious purported task of getting a degree, one realises that university spaces are not just objective structures in place since the decades when they were established. They are constantly evolving and changing. Changes happen both at the macro and micro levels, institutionally and intellectually. Social movements raising issues of equity and justice are reflected in both changes in the social composition of students and teachers and the curricula. One instance is the story of the women’s movement and the establishment of women’s studies, and subsequent feminist transformations of mainstream syllabi (Chaudhuri, 2010).  Similar processes are in evidence in a matter of caste, race and ethnicity.

It becomes important to highlight here that university spaces mean different things to different people based on their context, socioeconomic background, social class, gender, and physical and ascribed attributes. All these factors come into play when one is trying to understand how a university space may have a plethora of meanings attached to it, and how one space can be responsible for shaping up so many different kinds of subjective experiences, experiences that individuals have because of their social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) that they have at their disposal, along with how their mental structures of thought have been shaped due to socialisation since early childhood.

An individual’s subjective experiences are also shaped due to the different kinds of cultural, social and economic capital that individuals have at their disposal due to their differential social standing in society (Vaid, 2018). 

The Concept of Capital

As put forth by Pierre Bourdieu (1973), the concept of cultural capital is of paramount importance, especially within the field of education, to understand students’ subjective experiences, social mobility, etc., work in conjunction with capital that each individual possesses. ‘Academic success is directly dependent upon cultural capital and inclination to invest in the academic market’ (Bourdieu, 1973: 96). It provides the opportunity for personal achievement and to leave ascribed social status behind. Students who are first-generation learners have very low cultural capital at their disposal.

Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and cultural capital puts forth that the culture of the dominant class is transmitted and rewarded by the educational system. It is important to note that the dominant class culture works in both ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ ways. Cultural capital, in its three forms, that is, the embodied state, the objectified state, and the institutionalised state, entails familiarity with the dominant culture in society (Bourdieu, 1986). Since success at the university presupposes familiarity with the dominant culture and possession of cultural capital, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds lack cultural capital and familiarity with the dominant culture, so they usually have lower performance (Katsillis and Rubinson, 1990). 

Education and Mobility

Education is intricately linked to the functionality of social capital; it also plays an important role in understanding mobility patterns across generations. India has had a long history of policies, especially education policies, aimed at alleviating the inequalities suffered by socially and economically disadvantaged groups to encourage upward mobility. Despite the various policies, strands of research highlight the persisting effect of factors such as caste, class, and gender on the opportunities to gain access to education (Desai and Kulkarni, 2008; Vaid, 2018). 

India has witnessed a massive expansion in the higher education sector in recent years, but the expansion has existed alongside a differentiated and stratified society. It is often the case that students from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds usually study in prestigious higher education institutions and departments which offer more ambitious occupational trajectories. In contrast, those from less privileged backgrounds usually attend more affordable institutions.

Higher education has become pivotal for entry to a few well-rewarded occupations, meaning that higher education and social mobility are increasingly intertwined. Even though there has been a widening of participation in higher education in recent decades, it has been noted that simply increasing the number of students enrolling in higher education institutions does not mean that social inequalities have also subsequently reduced (Pathania and Tierney, 2018).

Therefore, it can be argued that education, social and cultural capital, caste, class, gender, and mobility patterns are all inextricably interlinked and need to be understood in juxtaposition to one another when one is analysing how universities as spaces of higher education shape students’ experiences not just within the university but also outside it.

References: 

1. Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction.  In R. Brown (Ed.), Knowledge, education, and cultural change: Papers in the sociology of education (pp. 71–84). London: Tavistock.
2. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research in the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press.
3. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. (2010). “The Travels and Travails of the Concept of ‘Gender'” in Maitrayee Chaudhuri edited Sociology in India: Institutional and Intellectual Practices. Pp. 381-399. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

4. Katsillis, J., & Rubinson, R. (1990). Cultural capital, student achievement, and educational reproduction: The case of Greece. American Sociological Review, 55(2), 270. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095632
5. Pathania, G. J., & Tierney, W. G. (2018). An ethnography of caste and class at an Indian university: Creating capital. Tertiary Education and Management,1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2018.1439998
6. Sonalde Desai, & Veena Kulkarni. (2008). Changing educational inequalities in India in the context of affirmative action.Demography,45(2),245-270. https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0001
7. Vaid, D. (2018). Uneven Odds: Social mobility in contemporary India. Oxford University Press.

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Upali Bhattacharya is a Sociology graduate and has been working in the space of social impact and education. She is an incoming PhD student at the Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech.