Conceptualising and performing: student engagement with university application processes in the UKTools Brown, Elizabeth (2025) Conceptualising and performing: student engagement with university application processes in the UK. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractDespite ongoing reforms to university admissions procedures, access to higher education in the UK is still stratified. Individual-specific social circumstances and experiences contribute to differential access as students are exposed to university-specific information in different ways and from different sources throughout their lives. The focus of this study was to ascertain the complex ways in which social factors influence how students conceptualise a university ideal and how they perform as this ideal during the university application process. To do so, I generated qualitative data from a set of socioeconomically and culturally diverse sixth form students regarding their experiences of the application process. Students completed a mock application designed to reflect actual admissions processes through personal statements, mock interviews and reflective focus groups. Thematic analysis was used to identify features students believed to signal ideality and their performances of these ideal features. Student performances of these ideal traits were categorised by complexity using a novel analytical framework. Divergences in complexity were investigated using Bourdieu’s concepts; specifically, fields capitals and habitus. Findings from the research indicated that students drew from their person-specific experiences and understandings of universities when advertising themselves as ideal candidates, with some students making more sophisticated advertisements of ideality based upon more elaborate understandings of the university and more opportunities to perform this ideality. This work is useful for teachers, students and practitioners to evaluate the way excellence is conceptualised in university spaces and how social factors differentially prepare applicants to envision and enact ideality.
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