Working-class students need more friends at university: a cautionary note for Australia's higher education equity iniative

In 2008, Denise Bradley and colleagues published their Review of Australian Higher Education. A key point of the Bradley Review was to highlight the long-standing under-representation of working-class people at Australia’s universities. Working class people represent 25% of Australia’s general population; however, they represent only 15% of students in higher education. Indeed, working-class Australians are three times less likely to attend university than other Australians. In response to these inequities, the Australian Government set up the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program in 2010 and doubled the percentage of equity funding from 2% in 2010 to 4% in 2012. These initiatives have three aims: (a) to increase the aspirations of working-class Australians to go to university; (b) to increase the percentage of working-class people at Australian universities from 15% to 20% by the year 2020; and (c) to support the academic success and retention of working-class students while they are at university. In this brief piece, I want to address this last aim – supporting working-class students at university. In particular, I want to argue that working-class students need to be better integrated into social life at university in order for them to have a better opportunity to succeed.