Inside Education

Working-class students hit by university snobbery twice, says Liam Beattie

Istill treasure my university acceptance letter more than I do my degree. Getting into higher education was an achievement that I craved at school. No amount of university snobbery can take that away from me or any other working-class people who successfully break into a world that isn’t built for us.

I was the first in my immediate family to attend university so I had to navigate my own path with applications. Growing up in the Borders – where there are only limited university courses available – also meant I had to uproot and foot the price tag that comes with moving.

Despite going to open days at universities with higher rankings, I fell in love with Stirling University. Unlike the older institutions, it was free from archaic rules and traditions that felt intimidating and unwelcoming.

Stirling was a melting pot of students from different backgrounds, with many also like me from working-class communities and the first to get into university. Conversations were seldom concerned with which school you had attended or who your parents were. I was more worried about being caught stealing someone’s ketchup than I was about not being accepted because of my upbringing.

This was in stark contrast to the conversations I had meeting friends of friends at older universities. I often received condescending remarks about being at one of the newer universities and confusion about why I chose to go to Stirling.

I felt those pangs of university snobbery recently when the broadcaster Andrew Neil ridiculed the quality of education at another of the non-ancient universities in a Twitter spat with a professor from Strathclyde University.

While Neil’s remarks may have been made in jest, it scratched at the surface of an educational snobbery that doesn’t just lack decency but also harms opportunities for those from the poorest backgrounds.

Research by The Guardian uncovered that classism and even accent prejudice is a particular problem in the Russell Group universities – of which Glasgow and Edinburgh unis are members – leading the Social Mobility Foundation to describe the situation as unacceptable and that accents had become a “tangible barrier” for some students.

While according to the Economics of Higher Education Group, first-in-family students are less likely to study at and graduate from elite universities and have a higher probability of not completing their degree.

University snobbery hits poorer young people twice over. It ostracises them from the ancient institutions and it derides those who attend other universities, both blatantly ignoring the significant challenges that these people have to overcome to be accepted into higher education in the first place.

Even when some financial barriers have been removed, such as tuition fees, in Scotland people from the wealthiest backgrounds are still twice as likely to attend university as those from the poorest, and parental education still plays a big factor in determining what their child will do once they leave school.

My university experience was far more representative of society at large than the discriminatory environments that the older universities seem determined to guard. It gave me and many other working-class teenagers a headstart in life that I would otherwise have struggled to achieve – that’s something to celebrate, not to scoff at.

Liam Beattie is a charity worker and freelance media commentator