Banking on the Future: Choices, Aspirations and Economic Hardship in Working-Class Student Experience

‘Education, education, education’. The Blairite slogan appears on the face of it uncontroversial and designed to attract universal electoral support. We all ‘know’ that education is important as a means to success in a meritocratic society, that qualifications are increasingly crucial for accessing a good career and that university education continues to be rewarded with higher incomes over the course of a working life. We assume, probably rightly, that all parents want to see their children do well at school and that increasing numbers of working-class parents are joining the middle class in aspiring to a university education for their children. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.