Becoming a Higher Education Student: Managing Expectations and Adapting to Independent Learning

This chapter traces the BAME students’ adaptation to university learning and experience of studying for a degree. Survey and interview data capture the pressures many students feel to ‘make good’ on their parents’ sacrifices and investment in education by achieving a first-class degree result. However, these expectations come into conflict with the transition from college as universities expect students to adapt as proactive independent learners while tacitly and unreflexively reproducing social norms of whiteness. Resultant feelings of racial and class unbelonging self-protection see independent learning effectively repurposed as self-reliance for BAME students. Though some are able to accumulate and deploy forms of Black cultural capital to claim racial agency within a predominantly white learning environment, others seek to build forms of bonding capital through the establishing of peer networks. These can help students collectively accrue knowledge while managing the pressures to achieve academically.