1. Professor Sue Clegg s.clegg@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

2.  Implications of elite to mass  The limitations of arguments from social mobility  Break in the linkage between participation and mobility  Importance of epistemic as well as social access  Powerful knowledge  The challenges for us

3.  United Sates mass participation - with 40% age participation rates as early as the 1960s  Followed by expansion in Western Europe and Japan in 1980s and then by growth in developed countries in East Asia and Latin America  China percentage of enrolments in 2006 was three and a half times that in 1997 - and with an increase from 3.4% in 1990 to 22% in 2006 – the rate of change is quite staggering  Globally 19% participation in 2000 to 26% in 2007  Low income countries had 7% enrolments compared to 67% for high income countries - with Sub Saharan Africa at 6% the US at 70%

4.  Policy agenda: employability and social mobility, knowledge economy and competitiveness  2003 White paper The Future of Higher Education, 2010 Strategy Document Skills for Sustainable Growth, 2011 White paper Students at the Heart of the System  HE a private good and students should contribute  Narrative not unique to UK 2009 UNESCO report massification linked to social mobility - costs shifted from state to student and increase in private providers

5.  The ‘logic’ of massification is inevitable and includes greater social mobility for a growing segment of the population, new patterns of funding of higher education, increasingly diversified higher education systems in most countries, and an overall lowering of academic standards  Question in relation to epistemic access the controversial last sentence

6.  Dominant narrative challenged by Brown Lauder and Ashton The Global Auction  Competitive logic of accumulation breaks jobs down and routinizes them  ‘Digital Taylorism’ profitability depends on asserting property rights and managing knowledge - transforming tacit personal knowledge into explicit codified knowledge  High tech companies ‘routine analytics’ done by graduates in Bulgaria and India where graduates a third of the cost of British ones

7.  High skills but low wages  Static or falling social mobility  Working and non-working poor are increasingly left behind –argument for higher education becomes even more compelling – high participation rates  Small highly mobile global elite  Jane Kenway’s work on elite formation – choose only a tiny number of elite universities  Not just of social access also epistemic access – need to look at curriculum

8.  Disciplinary knowledge specialised and special  Young ‘provides learners with a language for engaging in political, moral and other kinds of debates’  Powerful knowledge Wheelahan ‘Powerful knowledge is powerful because of the access it provides to the natural and social worlds and to society’s conversation about what it should be like’  Importance of higher education not just mobility

9.  Epistemic access to powerful knowledge  Esoteric (Durkheim's sacred) not everyday (profane)  Bernstein disciplinary knowledge singulars - with ‘their own intellectual field of texts, practices, rules of entry, examinations, license to practice, distribution of rewards and punishments’ protected by strong boundaries and hierarchies’

10.  Regional knowledge – look outward to the field of practice  Which disciplines enter a region depends on the recontextualising principles and its social base  Examples from the foundational bases of the modern academy eg medical science and engineering - a developed research and knowledge base beyond that of their contributory singulars  ‘a consecrated and canonised body of specialised professional knowledge that represents the stable repertoire gleaned from earlier research’ (Young and Muller 2014,14).

11.  Do they constitute powerful knowledge? eg business studies - requires empirical study  Dangers of vocationalisation –generic emphasis on trainability driven by the employability agenda with variable relationship to singulars  Wheelahan ‘This professional/ occupational hierarchy reflects the class structure in society more broadly. The professions are dominated by the social elites, while at the other end, lower VET qualifications in new fields are dominated by students from low socio-economic backgrounds’

12.  Work by Monica Mclean, Paul Ashwin and Andrea Abbas of sociology courses in higher education  Curriculum and pedagogy could not be read off from the ranking of universities  Staff in less prestigious sites maintained a curriculum that challenged their students in the same sorts of ways as in elite spaces  Problem that elite enjoy a ‘credibility excess’

13.  Not just a conservative defence of traditional disciplines  Feminist and other interventions from social movements involve making newer better knowledge claims  Reject strong voice epistemologies – and judgemental relativism but sociologically can show that newer participants challenged (some) existing disciplinary claims  Curriculum and knowledge matter for epistemic access

14.  Epistemic access to singulars eg BME attainment gap  Traditional regions eg SA huge differences in success on engineering degrees  How can newer regions retain access to powerful knowledge – question of recontextualization of singulars – avoiding generic ‘trainability’  Question of genuine vocational education and transitions  How to defend newer sites and provision and contest ‘credibility excess’ of elite sites