Introduction

This was how Jasmine, a white, working-class sociology graduate from UWE, described her idyllic dreams of what her life after university would be like. This upbeat dream of the future is typical of many of the participants in the Paired Peers study. As young people make their early steps into working lives, going to university is seen to offer a passport to worldly success and a secure future in a decently rewarded job, and is reflected in their optimism. Indeed, as we have discussed in Chapter 1, university participation is constructed in policy and political discourse as the ticket to the good life and a route to social mobility (Ingram and Gamsu, 2022). The pervasive discourse of social mobility within the higher education policy domain has promoted and maintained a belief in the employment rewards of higher education, which, in turn, has encouraged working-class young people's participation. This prospect is particularly alluring to those, like Jasmine, who are the first in their family to enter higher education, who understandably bank on education as the route to a more prosperous future. For many middle-class young people, who see going to university as the taken-for-granted thing to do (see Bathmaker et al, 2016), the prospect may not evoke in them the same kind of optimistic visions of class mobility; rather, it brings tacit expectations of consolidating their class position and contributing to continuing class reproduction. Yet, most students entering higher education will have their own aspirations and their own visions of success, which, as the chapters in this book show, are more diverse than narrow measures based on employment destination and earnings. In this chapter, we consider the motivations and dreams of participants in the Paired Peers study, and look at how what actually awaits lives up to these dreams through the eyes of two graduates: Jasmine and Martin.