Moira Munro

Leaving university early: exploring the differences between continuing and non‐continuing students

This article explores some of the issues surrounding student retention at two contrasting universities in Scotland. It is based on a relatively small‐scale quantitative survey of students who withdrew or continued, in order that direct comparisons may be made between the two groups. This comparison allows analysis of the constraints and opportunities that face all young people during their time in higher education, and the circumstances under which students decide to withdraw. This shows widespread and similar financial difficulties amongst students who continue and those who withdraw, suggesting that it is more useful to look at the points at which similar pressures seem bearable for one student but not for another. The research indicates that important factors in the decision to withdraw include: poor choice of course; limited social support networks; and lack of ‘fit’ between student and institution. While there is macro‐level evidence of a class gradient in withdrawal rates, the evidence unpacks more fully the reasons why students from a range of socio‐economic backgrounds decide to leave university early.

Performing (Housing) Markets

This paper offers an interpretation of how housing markets work which complements more traditional economic approaches. Building on a wider movement within cultural economy and economic sociology, it considers how (housing) markets are variously performed in the power-filled negotiations of buyers, sellers and market professionals. This is part of a larger undertaking, but here the focus is particularly on the role of legal, financial and information intermediaries in shaping local cultures of property exchange. This is a social rather than economic analysis of housing markets; it is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study. It is designed to shed light on how markets are made, though it might, in the end, change the way they are modelled.

‘Day students’ in Higher Education: widening access students and successful transitions to university life

Abstract This article explores the experiences of widening access students at two prestigious universities in Scotland. It is based on interview data collected from a small sample of young and mature students who had all attended a widening access course prior to coming to university. The analysis centres on the students’ construction of themselves as ‘day students’, who live at home and combine studying with commitments to family or to paid employment. While they see being day students as a pragmatic response to their financial and material circumstances, it is argued that this disadvantages the students within the university system, both through their limited ability to participate in the wider social aspects of student life and through their exclusion from networks through which important information circulates.

Students in cities: a preliminary analysis of their patterns and effects

This paper adds to a growing literature on the impacts of the growth in student numbers in the UK, by focusing explicitly on their spatial residential patterns and impacts on labour markets in cities. It shows that students are typically highly residentially concentrated and statistically the population of students shows a high degree of segregation from nonstudents. Turnover within student neighbourhoods is argued to be sufficiently high to cause significant neighbourhood and community disruption in many cities. Students are also shown to have very distinct labour-market characteristics, being highly concentrated within particular sectors and types of occupation. Here too they have the potential for wider impacts, including displacement effects in relation to other local young people from entry-level jobs and increasing the flexibilisation of working practices. Students are also distinctive in apparently being able to find work if they wish to, although the evidence suggests that this is probably marginally easier in more buoyant labour markets. There is much unexplained variation between cities, though, which suggests the need for more detailed local work.

The logic of loans: Students perceptions of the costs and benefits of the student loan

Government policy towards financial support for students means that students increasingly have to bear the costs of their education, often through acquiring significant student debt. This policy is largely justified with reference to the private benefits (through enhanced life-time earnings) that university graduates can expect to enjoy. Using evidence from a qualitative study of 49 students, this paper analyses the extent to which students are engaged in a process of rational weighing-up of the costs and benefits of higher education as implied by the policy stance. It also explores their interpretation of their financial position and Government policy towards them. It argues that students are very poorly informed about both the costs and benefits of higher education, and that financial outcomes are not created in an essentially private and individual fashion, but instead are strongly mediated by cultural and familial resources.

Housing as Health Capital: How Health Trajectories and Housing Paths Are Linked

This article explores the relationships between housing and health inequalities. It locates housing within a network, of health resources that can either promote well-being or increase susceptibility to disease. Housing thereby contributes to the accumulation, or depletion, of the health capital of individuals and communities. Qualitative interviews in three British regions help specify the links between health capital, on the one hand, and the network of resources, environments, events, institutions, and social relations comprising the housing system, on the other. The findings show why, from a health capital/health-resources-network perspective, a segment of the housing system (owner-occupation) that generally appears therapeutic can have the opposite effect for people whose resilience is low or whose health is in decline.

The Emotional Economy of Housing

This paper offers an interpretation of the role of emotions in animating housing markets which complements more traditional economic and behavioural studies of locally based house-price inflation. Looking to debates within social psychology and cultural studies we suggest that emotions permeate the materiality and meaning of housing markets as well as the experience of individuals acting within them. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Edinburgh, with households who bought in a rising market, we argue that housing transactions are emotional as well as economic affairs. We reconsider the fears that underpin what might appear to be ‘irrational exuberance’ and we argue that housing markets are propelled by a search for returns on emotional as well as financial investments.

Making Ends Meet: Student incomes and debt

This article seeks to explore the ways in which the current financial regime for supporting students impacts on the choices they make while studying for their first degree. It focuses particularly on the financial choices students make (or feel forced to make) in relation to work, debt and economising. It argues that the degree of discretion that students have is crucially related to the financial support they receive from their parents. However, even where parents are generous, most students seek an additional source of income to increase their autonomy in spending decisions. Parental attitudes are found to be important determinants of the ordering of drawing on other income. There is found to be a financially vulnerable group of students whose fragile financial position largely results from their parents being unable to offer much financial support; this group in particular finds their time at university characterised by considerable amounts of paid work and increasing debt.

Privacy in the private sphere

Abstract This article examines the issue of privacy within the home as a way of exploring the contradiction between feminist views that women and men experience the home differently ‐ and indeed that women may find the home oppressive ‐ and Saunders’ recent (1990) evidence that men and women express similar and equally strong positive sentiments about their home. We conclude that privacy within the home is negotiated within the wider framework of familial ideology and the ideals of ‘home’ and the companionate marriage’, so that within the home there is typically differential access to privacy for adults and children, and men and women.

Calculated Affection? Charting the Complex Economy of Home Purchase

This paper highlights some widely cited but rarely elaborated ‘local factors’ influencing housing market dynamics. Adopting a microstructural perspective, the focus is on home purchase in order to complement a literature that often concentrates on the way properties are sold. Drawing from over 90 qualitative interviews from a single compact city, housing markets are characterised as collective calculating devices, whose networks of people, things, materials and relationships are engaged in the practice of price. It is argued that price is an affective as well as an economic affair, whose volatility is more an expression of sociality and emotional intelligence than an exercise in irrational exuberance.