Expectation vs Experience: might transition gaps predict undergraduate students’ outcome gaps?

Steven Jones

Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK

Address: Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK; +44 (0)161 2753411

Email: sj@manchester.ac.uk

Word Count: 6,626

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Expectation vs Experience: might transition gaps predict undergraduate students’ outcome gaps?

Steven Jones

Abstract

Drawing on thematic analysis of one-to-one interviews with 85 undergraduate

students, this paper offers initial, exploratory analysis of whether known

outcome differentials may be partly attributable to students’ transition into

university. The study is located in the English higher education sector, where

fee increases have been accompanied by wider availability of metrics, and

outcome differentials have become a particular focus of attention. Specifically,

this paper examines (in)congruence between students’ expectations of higher

education and their experience while at university, tracking how recalled pre-

arrival expectations correlate with socio-economic status and school type. In

the case of students from ‘widening participation’ (WP) backgrounds, the

effect of attendance on an intervention (access) programme is also considered.

Findings point to a complex web of factors influencing the undergraduate

experience of students within the same institution. For WP students, the widest

gaps arise in relation to pedagogy, as the culture and curricula of higher

education are initially found inconsistent with expectations. Intervention

programmes make a small positive difference, primarily because social and

academic confidence is enhanced. For students educated at independent

schools, the widest gaps arise in relation to assessment, for which university-

level support and guidance is felt to be less personalised than expected. On a

structural level, findings questions the reliability of output metrics as proxies

for teaching quality given the extent to which they are predicted by students’

backgrounds and the nature of their individual transition into higher education.

Introduction

The ‘gap’ metaphor is a familiar one in research examining students’ transition into higher education, with titles of academic papers including phrases such as ‘Mind the Gap’ (Watt and Paterson 1997; Lowe and Cook 2003), ‘Widening the Gap’ (Heath 2007) and ‘Bridging the Gap’ (Leese 2010). At the opposite end of the undergraduate pipeline, we find reference to the ‘Achievement Gap’ (Bensimon 2005; Miyake et al.

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2010), and to other differentials (Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 2015, etc.), including completion (the likelihood of students not ‘dropping out’ of a course) and employability (as gauged both by income levels and the likelihood of having a ‘graduate’ job). The outcome that receives most attention is that relating to students’ likelihood of graduating from their course with either a ‘good’ degree (an upper second or better) or a ‘first’, once prior attainment is controlled for. While the most dependable predictor of degree attainment is the qualifications with which students enter university (Smith 2015), differentials have been noted in terms of ethnicity, gender, school type and socio-economic background (Crawford 2014; HEFCE 2015).

The primary contribution of this paper is to investigate whether gaps in transitioning offer a partial explanation for gaps in outcome. The approach, at this stage, is exploratory, and focused primarily on socio-economic background. Transition gaps are assessed qualitatively and outcome gaps are assessed quantitatively, so the aim of the research is not to demonstrate direct causation. Rather, extended interviews are conducted with students to drill deeper into their personal transitioning process, conceptualised here in terms of congruity between expectation and experience. The approach offers an alternative to blunt metrics such as the National Student Survey (NSS), which has been used since 2005 in the UK to gauge students’ satisfaction with their degree programme (Langan et al. 2015, Sabri 2013). With many nation’s higher education systems beginning to grapple with performance differentials among both home (Palacios and Alvarez 2015) and international (Crawford and Wang 2015) students, this case study of one high-prestige English university has global ramifications and the potential to shift practices and policy thinking across higher education sectors. The number of interviews conducted is greater than that of previous studies (Perez-Adamson and Mercer 2016; Wilcox, Winn, and Fyvie‐Gaulda 2006) and the hypotheses investigated potentially offer a new perspective on theoretical debates about learning gain and the metrics that seek to enumerate it (Liu et al. 2012). I begin the paper with an overview of relevant research in the field; I then explain how data were collected for this study; I then present findings around four emergent themes; and, finally, I interpret findings in terms of transition ‘capitals’ and student identities.

‘Gaps’ in the literature

Transition gaps describe how students from different backgrounds or with different personal characteristics adjust to degree-level learning. For example, Beaumont, Moscrop, and Canning (2014) report a ‘fault-line’ between the how students are positioned and guided by their schools and colleges, on one hand, and how they are received by their universities, on the other hand. Motivation is also said to change at the point of transition to university (Kyndt et al. 2015), and cultural assimilation within a new, often more elite educational environment can prove particularly challenging for some students (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2010). A ‘difference-

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education intervention’, in which incoming students were helped to understand how their diverse backgrounds can affect their higher education experiences, was found to smooth transition and increase performance (Stephens, Hamedani, and Destin, 2014). However, literature in the area mostly indicates that universities’ awareness of their students’ prior educational journey is scant, and their sensitivity toward the potential barriers to transition accordingly limited (Lowe and Cook 2003; Heath 2007; Burke 2012).

Outcome gaps describe how students from different backgrounds or with different personal characteristics perform while at university. For example, a HEFCE (2015) study of 284,515 UK graduates found that, once prior attainment is controlled for: full-time students outperform part-time students; female students outperform male students; White students outperform black and minority ethnic students; those from the highest-participation neighbourhoods outperform those from other neighbourhoods; and students from state schools (at all but the very highest attainment levels) outperform those from independent schools. The main input variable on which this paper focuses is socio-economic status, a factor that several studies identify as being of particular significance. For example, Crawford (2014) finds that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds are 3.4 percentage points less likely to drop-out, 5.3 percentage points more likely to graduate, and 3.7 percentage points more likely secure a ‘good’ degree than those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. A second input variable considered here is school type. Perez-Adamson and Mercer’s (2016) study of twenty entrants to Cambridge University found that anxiety about social and academic transition differed according to school type, and studies also suggest that students from independents schools, despite possible socio-economic advantage, do not always have comparably positive outcomes. For example, Naylor and Smith (2002) estimated that students who attended independent schools were 6.9% to 5.4% less likely to be awarded a `good' degree compared to those who attended a state sector school.

Attempts to account for outcome differentials include Sanders and Rose-Adams (2014) and Mountford-Zimdars et al. (2015), both of which emphasised the role of undergraduate curriculum, campus culture and student-staff relationships. Crawford (2014) noted that young people from higher socio-economic backgrounds may experience fewer external pressures or unexpected challenges whilst studying, and the importance of social integration to student outcomes is also underlined by Wilcox, Winn, and Fyvie‐Gaulda (2006), whose interviews with 34 first-year undergraduates suggested that cultural assimilation matters more than institutional ethos. Pittman and Richmond’s (2008) study of freshmen at US colleges also draws attention to non-academic barriers. However, Thomas (2002) and Burke (2012) focus more on the role of institutional habitus, arguing that the ways in which universities operate implicitly privilege some types of learners over others.

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This paper begins by exploring how students’ recalled expectations of university are influenced by their educational and socio-economic background, and how their experiences of university are subsequently influenced by their expectations. The extent to which pre-arrival programmes for students labelled WP affect the gap between expectation and experience is also considered. The theoretical principles underpinning the approach draw on established work by Reay, Crozier, and Clayton (2010), Burke (2012) and others suggesting that higher education covertly meets the academic expectations and favours the cultural predispositions of some types of student more than others. The specific contribution is to explore the possibility that output metrics, which are increasingly used as proxies of teaching quality by national governments (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2016), may in fact be the product of students’ backgrounds, and therefore less attributable to classroom pedagogy than to broader inequities within society. However, following Lehmann (2009) and Cotton et al. (2015), I move beyond ‘deficit models’ to identify ways in which different kinds of students find spaces to cope and flourish in their higher education environment.

Data and Methods

The case study for this research is the English higher education sector, where outcome gaps have become a particular focus of attention, both in public policy and public discourse, partly due to market-based ideologies that purportedly place student at the heart of the university system (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2011). Simultaneously, the English schooling system has moved towards a culture of testing and inspection (Kauko and Salokangas 2015), restricting curricula, disincentivising critical thinking and potentially widening the transition gap further. Participants in the research were undergraduate students attending the same UK university, a member of the Russell Group. The advantage of single-institution studies is that they allow key variables to be controlled for (Smith 2015; Thiele et al. 2014). For example, the students’ experience of university is likely to be more comparable, even in a large university, than it would across different institutions, and the selection procedure navigated on application is also likely to be analogous. The disadvantage of a single-institution methodology is that it prevents cross-university comparisons. It should also be noted that selection procedures can be localised to discipline-level, so the students we interviewed were not necessarily alike in terms of entry tariff.

Four types of undergraduate were targeted, as summarised in Table 1. The aim of the research was to learn more about the expectations and experiences of students from different educational and socio-economic backgrounds, so two groups were for WP students and two groups were for non-WP students, where WP is defined according to bundle of indicators used by the host university. All of the WP students came from a low-income household and were the first in their family to enter university. Within the WP group, a further distinction was made between those students who had successfully completed the intervention (Group A) and those who had not taken any

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part in the intervention (Group B). The intervention was a pre-arrival access programme, in this case a well-established scheme for local post-16 students that involved a series of personal development workshops, a three-day conference and one-to-one supervision of academic work from a member of university staff. Within the non-WP group, a further distinction was made between those students who had attended a state school (Group C) and those who had attended an independent school (Group D). None of the non-WP students had taken part in the intervention.

[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]

In each of the four groups, 70 undergraduate students were randomly selected from the total population and invited to participate in the study. Excluded from the population were mature students, part-timers, distance learners and those who had taken part in a foundation year. This allowed the four groupings to remain as comparable as possible. Crucially, all participants belonged to a local domicile. This control was necessary to ensure that fair comparisons could be made with intervention group (because attending a local school or college was a pre-condition of the access programme).

Of the 280 students contacted, 85 agreed to take part: 21 from Group A; 27 from Group B; 22 from Group C; 15 from Group D. Each attended one semi-structured, in-depth interview in which they were encouraged to reflect freely about their how they felt toward university, both before and after beginning their programme of study. Interviews took place in 2014 and 2015. Questions included “is the content of your course what you expected it to be like (if not, why not?)”, “how does the way you’re assessed at university differ from the way you were assessed at school/college?” and “are the social aspects of being a student what you expected?” Experienced research associates were used to conduct the interviews, none of whom were full-time academic staff at the university and none of whom were known previously to any interviewee. Full ethical approval was supplied by the host university, including guidance for interviewers on how to respond to any personal difficulties, anxiety or other distress reported by students. The sample is too small for individual performance data to be meaningful mapped, and the findings presented in the next section are mostly based on interview data. However, a small number of questions were directly asked of all interviewees, each modelled on the NSS, and responses invited along against a five point scale. Quantitative findings are indicative only. However, in total, over fifty-five hours of qualitative interview data were recorded (around 250,000 words of transcribed interaction).

Thematic analysis

This section begins by comparing average responses to three NSS-like questions among the study’s four groups, as defined in Table 1. The distribution is intended only to give a flavour of the way students’ background characteristics affect their

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expectations and experiences of higher education. Primarily, it serves to structure and underpin the more qualitative interpretation that follows. Statistical significance at the p<0.05 level was not found, as one would expect given the relatively small sample size. However, significance at the p<0.1 was noted in ways that did help shape the formulation of the categories below (and helped avoid the pitfalls of thematic analysis noted by Braun and Clarke (2006), among others). For example, in relation to teaching, the difference between the state school non-WP group and both the intervention and non-intervention groups was statistically significant at the p<0.1 level. This distribution underpins the second of the thematic categories, ‘Being Taught: transitioning from explicit instruction to implicit assumption’. Note also that the categories identified mirror significant patterns identified in larger scale studies. For example, the positive responses to questions about their degree programme from state school non-WP students, as seen in Table 2, offers an immediate parallel with HEFCE’s (2015) finding that state-educated students outperform equal-attainment students from the independent sector, and that students from higher-socio-economic backgrounds outperform those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

[TABLE TWO ABOUT HERE]

As Table 2 shows, the intervention can be seen to affect WP students, with those who completed the pre-arrival programme responding slightly more favourably to all three statements, most notably in relation to receiving sufficient support. For students educated at an independent school, overall satisfaction and teaching quality is rated higher than for the WP groups, but some way behind the state school non-WP group. However, support is less positively evaluated, falling between average responses from the intervention and non-intervention WP groups. These broad patterns suggest that, within the sample, students from different backgrounds are seeing higher education through different lenses and experiencing learning in different ways. I now turn to interview data to explore whether such differences may connect to underlying variation in pre-arrival expectations. It should be noted that the host university treats all students alike once they begin their course of study (i.e. it does not offer special pedagogical or pastoral support to WP groups), and university staff would not be formally notified of, say, the school type their students attended. The differences identified in Table 2 are most likely the result of wider, cultural factors.

Interview evidence is presented under four sub-headings, each derived from the analysis of the data described above. Recurring patterns, conceptualisations and underlying dispositions were identified by the author and, separately, by a second coder. The categories discussed below are those recognised by both coders. The first three categories offer interpretations for the distributions shown in Table 2; the fourth category reflects a broader overall trend in the data.

a) Being Helped: transitioning from fear of academics to co-production of knowledge

b) Being Taught: transitioning from explicit instruction to implicit assumption

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c) Being Assessed: transitioning from ‘not knowing the jump’ to embracing assessment practices

d) Being Confident: transitioning from ‘not knowing the language’ to fluency in university-speak

Other themes emerged in the data, albeit at lower levels of frequency, some of which are familiar in the literature. For example, the transition from being an outsider to ‘fitting in’ is noted by Reay, Crozier, and Clayton (2010), among others. However, the four themes discussed in detail are those that emerged most compellingly across the data, and were most consistent both with significance testing and with the findings of previous, larger scale studies.

Being Helped: from fearing academics to actively collaborating

One of the most prominent differentials in the interview data related to students’ perceptions about the extent to which help and support was available during the transition into higher education. Students from a non-WP state school background felt most supported by some margin. Those from a WP backgrounds and from independent schools reported lower levels of satisfaction, though the intervention did have a small positive affect on the former group. One reason for the differences is that expectations of support in higher education varied according to students’ educational background. For WP students, a recurring theme was under-confidence in approaching academic staff to seek support.

• ‘you’re on your own, really / no one checks on you / it’s not contact hours at all / you have just to e-mail someone / I’m not really like that / I’m the first person in my family going to university so / am I supposed to e-mail about this? / do my classmates know already?’ - intervention WP student

• ‘there’s always an email saying ‘oh we’ve got office hours’ but it’s like the case of / like I understand that it’s like independent but it’s not very / there’s not like a connection built / there’s only one lecturer that I could go up to because he knows me / so all the rest of my lecturers I don’t feel like there’s any kind of connection with them / I feel like I was just a pupil in a class who wrote an essay and then left’ - non-intervention WP student

In the first statement a connection is made, unprompted, between being first-generation and not understanding the tacit protocols of the student-lecturer relationship. The fear expressed is that classmates already know how to ask for help and are more comfortable doing so. Another WP interviewee characterised the school-to-university transition as that from ‘don’t be doing any thinking of your own’ to ‘do all your thinking on your own’. Clearly, part of what makes higher education ‘higher’ is the requirement for students to embrace more independent forms of learning (Barnett 1990; Perez-Adamson and Mercer 2016). However, many students reported a

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large and initially insurmountable gap between an educational environment that ostensibly rewarded passivity and rote learning (‘we just got spoon-fed [at school]’) and one in which they were expected to contribute more actively (‘it’s like “oh right we’re on our own now?”’). Increases in learning group sizes (‘being one of three hundred instead of one in fifteen’) compounded transition difficulties.

The second statement above captures the structural assumptions that universities can make when offering support. For many interviewees, the notion of ‘office hours’ was problematic because it placed the student as initiator and required the interaction to take place in ‘their space / not joint [space]’. Office hours were variously described as ‘awkward’, ‘painful’ and ‘daunting’ by WP students, few of whom were confident enough to enter an otherly environment and lead a conversation with an academic. It is also notable that the language of the second statement betrays conceptualisations more closely associated with secondary than tertiary level education (‘I was just a pupil in a class’). However, when WP students did seek help, most were reassured. One non-intervention WP student, who had previously acknowledged ‘I probably wouldn’t put my hand up / I’m quite shy anyway,’ went on to describe gradually developing strategies to overcome her inhibition and to ‘go and find [lecturers] in their offices’. Another non-intervention WP claimed ‘they don’t care about you as much as in college / it doesn’t matter as much to them whether you do well or not.’ However, later in the interview, when pressed, she acknowledged this was not necessarily a complaint: ‘it forces you to think for yourself / I go the library more now / get answers from books / you know.’ As Lehmann (2009) notes in his study of how working-class students overcome class boundaries, those who initially felt like outsiders often proved best equipped in the long term to rise to the academic challenges of higher education.

For students who had benefited from stronger connections with teaching staff during their previous educational path, a different set of issues emerged. In this and in other ways, a marked school type difference was observable:

• ‘it’s the same as at school really / the help’s there / you’ve just got to ask’ - independent school non-WP student

• ‘they’re probably sick of me / all the times I’m knocking on their door asking questions’ - independent school non-WP student

The second of the two statements above begins to explain why independent school students did not rate the support they received as highly as their non-WP state school counterparts. Though independent school students reported developing productive relationships with staff, to the extent that some were able to game assessment practices (‘you can pick up clues / you know / this and that’), they also sensed that support was rationed (‘they’ll only go so far / they’ll give you so much and then they don’t want to go any further / you can just tell’). In other words, even though both the

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WP groups and the independent school group felt under-supported, their reasons were very different. For the WP groups, the school-to-university gap was so culturally great that feelings of isolation and abandonment initially lurked. For independent school students, asking for support was less unnerving, but the higher education experience was felt to fall short of expectations because such resources were less freely available than they had previously been accustomed to.

So why were students from non-WP state school backgrounds most content with the support available from their university? One hypothesis is that their expectations were most aligned with their experience. In other words, the non-WP state school students were most adept at bridging the transition gap.

‘it’s just different / like I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse / it’s different / in college you’re in classes of about twenty two and there’s always like revision sessions after school / but at uni you’ve got to e-mail the person / you’ve got to arrange a meeting and stuff’ - state school non-WP student

‘the lecturers do put down their e-mail addresses / and ‘if you’ve got any questions feel free to e-mail me / I’m happy to respond’ / so they do offer that chance / and they do stick around for a few minutes after lectures in case you want to ask them some questions / basically the main difference between university and college is it’s just less personal’ - state school non-WP student

The statements above were made by students who understood that different types of support were associated with secondary and tertiary education, and bridged the gap without necessary expressing a preference for either. They focused more on the procedural aspects of higher education than on content, and were less likely to compare themselves with other students. Their state school backgrounds gave them the autonomous skills, personal tenacity and conceptual flexibility to adapt, and their non-WP status allowed them sufficient cultural capital and individual confidence to cope from the outset with a less personalised support system.

Being Taught: transitioning from explicit instruction to implicit assumption

In addition to mismatches in expectations of support at university, interview data repeatedly showed that students’ pre-arrival expectation of pedagogy were not alike. The two statements below were made by WP students, for whom the academic demands of higher education were generally felt more keenly.

‘there’s a lot I don’t get yet / lectures are hard / I never know what I’m supposed to be writing down / at school the teachers knew if you were struggling with something and they’d be like “okay let’s go through that again”’ - non-intervention WP student

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‘it’s not what you get taught / it’s how you get taught / it’s a proper jump’ - non-intervention WP student

‘I didn’t have a clue what it would be like / college is so different / everything smaller and right there.’ - non-intervention WP student

The more personalised, focused nature of school-based pedagogy is captured by the first statement. WP students appeared to find teaching-based transitions more difficult to navigate, often reporting feelings of separation (‘you’re all alone with it’), disaffection (‘it’s harder to get that buzz you get when you know you’re definitely doing it right’) and disorientation (‘everywhere’s big and you’re never totally sure you’re where you should be’). The final statement recalls previous studies (Jones et al. 2016) suggesting that the architecture of higher education can itself be a barrier to learning if students are unsure about their place and space within the campus. Many found it challenging to be in an environment regarded as less learner-focused (‘getting the information you need is definitely harder’) and more austere (‘some of the rooms / they don’t seem much like they were made for students’).

For those from an independent school background, transitioning to higher education was a smoother, less stressful experience, and the majority reported feeling comfortable with their new environment as soon as they arrived. Reference was frequently made to being ‘primed’ for university by schoolteachers, and the statements below give a flavour of how explicit such instruction could be.

‘at school, they told us what it’s like at university / how the work’s different you know / what to expect from lectures and lecturers.’ - independent school non-WP student

‘it’s not that different from school really / or, at least, you know what it’ll be like because they’ve been telling you / getting you ready for it / you know’ - independent school non-WP student

For non-WP students, especially those educated in the independent sector, far fewer learning bumps arose on the road from compulsory to post-compulsory education. One reported being warned that he would need to become a more active learner, read more widely and become more auto-didactic. Another arrived at university knowing that ‘you can’t just sit back and wait for someone to notice you’re struggling / that’s not how it is.’ While such thinking might seem little more than common sense to academic staff immersed in deep-rooted scholarly cultures, it runs counter to the educational model on which most English students were schooled (Kauko and Salokangas 2015). It also offers a possible explanation for later outcome variance: in general, the WP students interviewed were more apprehensive about their place within the university, more aware of prevailing social hierarchies, and less ready to focus on learning. This brings to mind Donnelly’s (2015) observation that many

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schools communicate hidden messages about higher education, and affirms the importance of social and cultural capital, as characterised by Whitty, Hayton and Tang (2015) in terms of ‘knowing the ropes’.

It should be noted that the intervention made a positive difference to overall satisfaction levels among WP students precisely because it emulated the approach of independent schools by giving undergraduates the kind of insider knowledge and self-reliance that some of their peers already possessed. Responses to interview questions suggest that practical advice, greater institutional familiarity and expanding friendship networks all aid the transition to higher education.

‘I think I already knew what I expected [of university teaching] because I was on the [intervention programme] / so because of that I was already familiar with the university’ - intervention WP student

‘it’s like a preview of how you’ll get taught / what it’ll be like’ - intervention WP student

The key difference reported in relation to pedagogy involves preparedness. Students from non-WP backgrounds benefited from a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how universities operate; they were forewarned about the different and new academic environment that they would encounter. In many cases, this was not ‘unspoken’ cultural capital so much as the end product of systematic coaching in how to succeed at university. The strength of the intervention programme was to extend such insights to WP students.

Being Assessed: from not ‘knowing the jump’ to embracing assessment practices

Assessment was an area of difficulty for undergraduates from all backgrounds. This relates partly to differences in ‘being taught’, as students transition from a teach-to-the-test culture to more autonomous models of learning (Christie et al. 2016). However, it is also because the nature of assessment in higher education differed fundamentally from that encountered previously by students, as the two statements below testify:

‘I don’t think that at the start of like my programme they made it very clear how everything was marked and I don’t think they gave a very good example of the standard of university work / because it’s a big jump to go from essays where you don’t have to do citations or bibliographies or anything like that to academic level especially if you don’t really have much help / they didn’t really go over that and it was kind of an expectation for you to know what the jump was’ - non-intervention WP student

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‘at school the whole emphasis is on teaching you a small amount and then you practicing it with help from the teachers / whereas at university you get a large amount of information put in front of you / you then have to go away and understand it / the assessment is different / harder’ - independent school non-WP student

The ‘jump’ metaphor was used by a number of students to describe the shift in how they were assessed in higher education relative to their previous educational experiences. However, responses to assessment bucked the general trend so far because WP students reported the highest levels of satisfaction with how they were assessed and independent school students reported the lowest levels. Independent school students were also most likely to struggle to adjust to academic conventions (‘it’s like a code’), to complain about feedback (‘I was like ‘is that it?’’), and to query assessment practices (‘what you get tested on / it’s totally different to what you get taught’). By contrast, many state school students welcomed the opportunity to be assessed on new ways of thinking rather than on old ways on memorising. One non-intervention WP student found university-level assessment unexpectedly liberating: ‘they want you to explore more / you know / think more / that’s weird at first but definitely better.’

Being Confident: transitioning from ‘not knowing the language’ to fluency in university-speak

The final category differs from the previous three in that it relates to students’ personal development rather than to their direct engagement with the university. However, as students reported new ways of being taught, supported and assessed, they also spoke about the ways in which their personal confidence had changed – or been required to change – in a higher education context. Often the starting point was language. As noted in previous studies (Preece 2009; Jones 2016), many young people struggle to understand the jargon of higher education. One WP interviewee specifically recalled ‘not knowing the lingo’ and another reported that ‘it took [her] ages to work out what everyone was on about’. The degree award system proved particularly problematic for WP students, many of whom were unfamiliar with the classifications and criteria. Again, WP students often feared their ignorance being exposed if they sought help.

‘it was all very new / I wasn’t too sure / I knew that the grades were like first and that but I was quite surprised to find out that 70 per cent is for first / I thought it was not too bad’ - intervention WP student

‘who do you ask when you don’t know what things mean? / who do you go to? / I’ve never got that’ – non-intervention WP student

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Technical doubts were also raised about academic terminology (Preece 2009), with students not necessarily understanding differences between, say, a ‘lecture’ and a ‘seminar’, or an ‘undergraduate’ and a ‘postgraduate’. Data also revealed academic insecurity, often reflecting wider stratification in society.

• ‘one of my worries was that / just from my point of view / coming from school and then being taught by someone who is extremely clever and talented in their field / that maybe it would be too complicated to understand’ - intervention WP student

• ‘once I got what it was all about / what everything meant / then yeah I mostly did okay’ - intervention WP student

The scholarly under-confidence that often accompanies difficulties with terminology has been identified as a key factor in would-be university applicants making decisions about participation (Jones 2013). However, it is notable that, in the longer term, the dreaded ‘cleverness gap’ did not materialise for interviewees (‘I don’t know what I was worried about’ added one non-intervention WP student after recounting a number of pre-arrival anxieties). Of course, such concerns may still render the undergraduate playing field uneven, and may offer a possible explanation both for transition gaps, because different school type and socio-economic backgrounds associate with different levels of personal confidence, and for outcome gaps, because state school students’ performance accelerates exponentially as the confident gap closes.

Discussion: transition capitals and student identities

Following Mountford-Zimdars et al. (2015), this study has added a qualitative perspective to research into the causes of outcome differentials (HEFCE 2015), specifically exploring the hypothesis that variation in the ways in which students from different backgrounds transition to university could be a causal factor. For all students, the school-to-university transition is a potential determinant of later outcomes. Those who transition successfully report greater confidence, a stronger sense of academic fit, and better professional relationships with university staff. Those who transition unsuccessfully report having to play ‘catch-up’ and a creeping sense of academic disaffection.

Though transition problems were reported by many of the students interviewed, some also offered insights into the aspects of their experience that they valued most. A recurring theme was institutional belonging. Even though students were rarely involve directly in the university’s scholarship, they identified an active research environment as a distinguishing feature of higher education. For state school non-WP students in particular, as the statements below demonstrate, feeling connected to the wider research culture of the university was central to their student experience and identity.

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‘I like that we’re being taught by people who are definitely very involved in what they’re doing / so one of my lecturers last year he is writing on graphite and he knows about graphite so what better can you have you know / again / you know / our particle physics lecturer he would be telling us about the experiment he did in the eighties to discover the thing he’s teaching us about now / they all have so much experience in their work and so you feel sort of involved in the research aspect even though you’re not doing it yet / you feel like you get a feel for what it’s like’ - state school non-WP student

‘that’s the best thing compared to college / once you get used to all the weird ways universities do stuff it’s always better getting taught by experts’ - state school non-WP student

Statements like those above have clear implications for institutional strategies. In the context of funding levels becoming more dependent on excellence frameworks, concerns have been expressed about the separation of research and teaching (Brown and Smith 2013; Trowler, Fanghanel, and Wareham 2005). Qualitative evidence from this study would indicate that the integration of research and teaching is fundamental to student development and satisfaction.

Less positively, students from all backgrounds report transitioning difficulties, often exacerbated in the English sector by rising fee levels. As one non-intervention WP student noted, ‘you feel worried and you feel guilty because it’s costing so much and you’re still like “what is it I’m supposed to be doing again?”’ More broadly, interview data shows WP students carrying particular kinds of ‘luggage’ with them to university: expectations of more active support; under-confidence in their academic ability; unfamiliarity with the language of the sector. These factors could help to explain outcome differentials relating to socio-economic status. However, state school students also arrive more likely to be equipped with the resilience needed to adapt to new learning cultures, the elasticity to respond to different assessment styles, and the independence of mind to accommodate new pedagogies (Lehmann 2009). These factors could help to explain outcome differentials relating to school type.

One variable that made a positive difference for WP students was participation on an intervention programme. Partly, this is for reasons around social acceptance and cultural integration. For example, one intervention WP student noted ‘the [programme] helped / I stayed mates with a few of the people I met on it and that’s good because then when you arrive it’s not like you’re totally on your own.’ However, the intervention also succeeded because it closed the gap between students from different backgrounds by equipping its participants with more of the capitals with which peers from independent schools and higher socio-economic backgrounds already had: ‘without knowing what I know from the [programme] it’d all have been way different / those first few lectures / those first few weeks / I’d have just been [shrugs]’.

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That the undergraduate pipeline differs for students of different backgrounds is hardly surprising. However, the extent to which expectations of higher education influence transitioning success is perhaps greater than previous studies allow (Leese 2010; Lowe and Cook 2003), especially in a more marketised system. The smoother the transition, interview data would suggest, the more positive the undergraduate experience. And the more positive the undergraduate experience, one might reasonably deduce, the greater the likelihood of long-term positive outcomes.

Conclusion

By drawing on evidence from detailed interviews with 85 undergraduates from four different socio-economic and school type backgrounds, this study has helped to develop a richer sense of students’ experiences than that offered by rudimentary satisfaction ‘snapshots’ like the NSS (Langan et al. 2015). Responses suggest that students’ pedagogical expectations predict how favourably they experience their time at university (Lowe and Cook 2003). When invited to talk freely and at length about higher education, many undergraduates reported deep-rooted social, academic and inter-personal anxieties. Though such anxieties are well documented in the literature (Burke 2012; Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2010), the contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that students from different backgrounds conceptualise university in different ways, drawing on divergent language to frame their experience and positioning themselves differently in relation to what they perceive as academic norms. As in Crozier, Burke, and Archer’s (2016) study, the context is that of a highly competitive, rapidly deregulated higher education system; the key finding is that feelings of estrangement, both personal and academic, can begin at the earliest of stages for some students and offer a plausible partial explanation for persistent differentials in later-stage outcomes.

The benefit of more qualitative approaches is that they allow for undergraduates’ voices to be heard directly. More work, however, is needed before firmer causal connections can be made between transition gaps and outcome gaps. Quantitative studies tell us that the intersection of background characteristics impacts key outcomes (Smith 2015). Neither gender nor ethnicity is addressed in the study. Metrics like the NSS offer little explanatory potential and tend to assume that all students arrive at university an equally blank canvas (Bennett and Kane 2014; Sabri 2013). Universities increasingly seek to evolve their culture and pedagogy in ways that address persistent outcome gaps among undergraduates that begin their degree programmes on an equal academic footing. To sustain this, a fuller understanding of students’ individual back-stories and shared identities is needed (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015), as is awareness of the implicit messages about higher education conveyed surreptitiously by schools (Donnelly 2015) and often negotiated through peer networks (Brooks 2003). For it is these messages that determine the pre-arrival expectations that ultimately influence students’ outcomes.

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Transitioning literature has long embraced gap metaphors. The findings of this research confirm why: both socio-economic status and school type predict incongruences between students’ expectations and experiences of university, and thus foretell differences in transition success. How such gaps might be closed is now the focus of several studies (Leese 2010; Watt and Paterson 1997), with the role of learner identity increasingly considered essential in ‘building bridges’ (Briggs, Clark and Hallbor 2012). The evidence presented here goes further, suggesting that students from different backgrounds vary starkly in terms of their confidence to develop autonomous learning techniques, their sense of cultural acceptance, and their engagement with programme curricula and personnel. Given such variation in input, the extent to which outcome metrics are a trustworthy reflection teaching quality is questioned. In the structural context of stratified schooling systems and widening socioeconomic divisions, further research is needed to understand the nature of individual students’ transitions to university, so that gaps can be closed at the point of entry as well as metricised at the point of exit.

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